along excessively steep slopes of rock or detritus retarded progress. Beyond the little village of Parpish we had to cross extensive mountain faces of gliding talus, forbidding in its absolute barrenness, and many hundreds of feet above the river. From such ground the vividly green fan of the village of Reshun, on the opposite bank at the mouth of a deep gorge coming down from a glacier-crowned peak, looked singularly inviting. The bird's-eye view we had of it showed clearly the verdant sward of the polo-ground, and by the side of it the rubble-built dwelling in which Edwardes and Fowler with their handful of men had made so heroic a stand in 1895. Even the gap in the wall enclosing the polo-ground from which the two young officers had watched the game which was to end with their treacherous capture and the massacre of their men, could be made out exactly.
There was nothing about Reshun with its smiling
orchards and fields to suggest such a tragedy. But the wild and desolate Kuragh defile, entered some distance above it, seemed by Nature designed as a scene for bloodshed. We passed its four or five miles of rocky wilderness in the gloom of the falling evening. There was not a tree
or shrub to relieve the sombre brown of the precipitous spurs, and of equally forbidding ravines between them. Not far from its upper end had been enacted the bloodiest episode of 1895, the destruction of Ross's detachment of the 36th Sikhs. We saw from across the tossing river the shallow caves or rather grottoes by the water's edge in which that small body of doomed men had taken refuge for several days. Just a little higher up were the stone-shoots descending from almost inaccessible cliffs which the Chitralis with goat -like agility had climbed to bar retreat to the relatively open ground of Kuragh village.
I fancied I could recognize the steep rock slope up which the men, worn out by days of starvation, had tried one night to effect their escape. Was it surprising that a seemingly unscalable rock face barring their track had stopped the men from the plains of the Manjha and driven them back to their ill-chosen refuge ? When at last forced by hunger the hapless Sikhs turned to run the gauntlet of
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