Chitralis are quite illiterate, and certainly not a dozen in the country can either read or write. Even the Mehtar could not read ; and I do not suppose there has ever been a Mehtar of Chitral who could. But these Chitralis could perfectly well understand pictures, not of things which they had never seen, such as ships, but pictures of men, animals, and natural objects, with which they were acquainted. When Colonel Lockhart's Mission visited the country in 1885-86, Dr. Giles took several photographs of the people, and other photographs had been taken of Chitralis who had travelled down to India. When I showed these photos to my visitors, I found that they could readily say who each man in the photo was ; and when they saw photos of British officers who had visited Chitral, they were able to put the correct names to them. They had their own very definite ideas about beauty. In the illustrated papers, and in advertisements, there would often be fancy pictures or portraits of princesses or actresses, over which they would grow very enthusiastic, and they would generally select as the most beautiful very much the same types as a European would. But there was one very pretty picture in the advertisement of a soap-maker, who shall be nameless, which I thought they would certainly like ; yet they said the lady in question was not worth looking at, and the reason they gave for this was because she had grey hair ! There was no intention of the artist to give her grey hair, but in our prints we have what is really nothing more than a conventional sign for indicating the light falling on a subject, and they thought this light falling on the hair was grey hair.
The Mehtar used to grow very enthusiastic over some of
the advertisements. One, in the Field, of an incubator for hatching eggs, excited his special curiosity, and when I ex-
plained to him that it was a machine for turning eggs into chickens, he wanted me to write off at once for one for him. A picture of a collapsible boat also won his admiration, and
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