IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
42 THROUGH MASTUJ
CH. V
defiles, rarely broken by alluvial fans which alone offer
room for cultivation. In spite of the new bridle-path
maintained by the Military Works on this important line of communication to Gilgit, the risks to the baggage from projecting rock corners and talus slopes forming natural stone shoots were not to be regarded lightly. The kindness of Colonel Twigg had allowed me the hire of trusty Commissariat mules. Yet even they with trained drivers managed to knock off loads on every one of the marches. Luckily none fell far down, and the losses were confined to supplies laid in at Chitral. Moroi, a pretty village ensconced in orchards, was our first halt after a day spent in passing gloomy gorges. From there I crossed to the right bank to examine a rock-carved inscription opposite the hamlet of Jomshili, while the baggage continued the second march by the main route along the left bank.
It proved a long day's work for me and my little party. Our trying path zigzagging up and down precipitous spurs spun out the distance to fully thirty miles, and was in places too bad even for led ponies. The interest of the inscription, however, and of the rock-carving above it amply repaid me for the trouble. The former, neatly cut in a great granite boulder by the side of the narrow track skirting the steep spur known as Pakhturinidini, proved to contain a dedicatory Sanskrit record in Gupta characters of about the sixth to eighth century A.D. Above it I found
to my delight the carefully engraved representation of a Stupa, showing in accurate detail the identical architectural
proportions which I had again and again observed in the ruined Stupas of Kashgar and Khotan. There were the three bases, the drum and the dome exactly conforming to the traditional precept followed by the Buddhist builders of Eastern Turkestan.
The sun, in spite of an elevation of over 6000 feet, beat down mercilessly during the hours which were needed
to make a paper cast of the inscription and to prepare the rock carving for photographing. Its outlines had first to be ' picked out ' from the black ground of the granite boulder, and with nothing but hard pebbles at hand this was slow work. Then the badness of the track winding
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