my boxes, with survey instruments and similar çontents, that I watched the operation. Heavy rain was falling at the time, and when at last we had all the ponies once more on a safe snow-bridge, men and animals were alike soaked. By one o'clock I reached the Gorai rest-house, down to which the valley was covered. with snow; having taken nearly seven hours to cover the eleven miles of the march.
The little rest-house, looking doubly bleak in the drizzling rain, held already three ` Sahibs,' officers who were returning from their shooting nullahs to Kashmir and the plains. Refreshed by their hospitality, I decided to push on to the next stage, Gurez, where better shelter and supplies were available. The offer of some Bakhshish, and the hope of a dry and comparatively warm corner for the night, overcame the remonstrances of the ` Markobans,' and the little caravan moved on. Some four miles lower down I reached the main valley of the Kishanganga, and in it the first Dard village. Another ten miles' march up the valley brought me to Gurez, a collection of villages at a point where the valley widens to a little plain, about a mile broad.
Sombre and forbidding the valley looked between its high pine-covered mountains and under a dark, rainy sky. The effect was heightened by the miserable appearance of the . rude log-built dwellings scattered here and there along the slopes, and by the dark-coloured sand in the bed of the river. The latter bears, not without good reason, the name of the " Black Ganga " (in Sanskrit, Krishnaganga). The backward state of the vegetation showed that spring had only just commenced in the valley, which here has an elevation of about 8,000 feet above the sea. With its short summer and scanty sunshine it can raise but poor crops of barley and ` Truniba,' and the population is accordingly thin.
The mountain range towards Kashmir marks also a well-defined ethnographic boundary. The Dard race, which inhabits the valleys north of it as far as the Hindukusli,
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