10 BETWEEN HYDASPES AND INDUS CH.I
hardy plant,' and fairly intelligent, like most of his fellowShalguns, cross - bred of Kashmiri and Tibetan. So I decided to take him along, with the fond wish that his help as cook's understudy might not often be needed. Our small party further included my faithful old caravan man, Muhammadju from Yarkand, who had braved the wintry passes in order to join me, and had narrowly escaped with his life at the close of March when an avalanche swept away and buried half a dozen of his fellow-travellers on the Burzil.
Rai Sahib Ram Singh had brought up a small armoury of surveying instruments from the Trigonometrical Survey Office, and also a few carbines and revolvers with ammunition which prudence demanded we should take from the stores of the Rawalpindi Arsenal. The equipment provided with much care by the workshops of the First Sappers and Miners at Roorkee was also necessarily bulky, including as it did tools of all sorts for the Naik, and a raft of special design floated by numerous goatskins, which were to be utilized also for transport of water in the desert. By dint of much overhauling, elimination, and arrangement I succeeded at last in reducing the whole of our baggage to fifteen mule-loads, one less than the train with which I had started on my first expedition. Three among them, with articles not likely to be required until the autumn, were to go by the Kara-koram trade route to Khotan. Taking into account that our equipment comprised indispensable stores of all kinds, calculated to last for two and a half years, and among them the great and fragile weight of close on two thousand photographic glass plates, I felt satisfied with the result of my efforts at compression.
Fortunately Abbottabad presented itself to me not merely in the light of a ' Transport and Supplies' base. I found there a number of kind friends and—spring in all its hill glory. Banks of white and blue irises stretched over the slopes of the pretty ' Station ' gardens. The
thoroughly English-looking bungalows were covered with masses of roses, among them that pride of the Frontier,
the large - petalled Mardan rose. All along the quiet shady lanes of the little cantonment the scent of blossom-
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