A.
DURAND, The Making of a Frontier (1899)
DEDICATED
TO
THE OFFICERS AND MEN
BRITISH
AND NATIVE
WHO
SERVED AT GILGIT
1889-1893
PREFACE
SOME word of explanation seems due when an
unknown writer obtrudes a personal narrative on the public. My reason for
writing this book was, that as the story of the development of the Gilgit
Frontier, told in my letters and diaries, was read with interest by some who
saw those papers, it seemed probable that its publication might give to those
who have no chance of seeing the sort of life their countrymen lead on an
uncivilised frontier, a faithful idea of what such an existence means. The
book is a plain and unvarnished tale of the experiences of a frontier officer
in times of peace as well as in those of war.
It was written under adverse circumstances, in
the scanty hours of leisure snatched from official work in
The book contains no dissertations on Frontier
policy, no criticisms or attacks on those who direct that of the Government
of India. I have no wish to join the bands who ride out to do battle with the
windmills of the forward or backward policy, and it is, in my old-fashioned
opinion, disloyal for an officer still in the service to criticise his
superiors, even should he consider that he has grounds for his views, which
is not my case. Moreover, such criticism is generally foolish; for the man on
the Frontier sees but his own square on the chess-board, and can know but
little of the whole game in which he is a pawn. It has been my aim merely to
give a faithful account of the policy pursued on the Gilgit Frontier, of the
steps taken to give it effect, and of the result attained. The reader who
expects to find cut-and-dried dogmatic opinions as to the management of our
relations with Frontier tribes will be disappointed. These, as a rule, can
only be given, with their full effect, by men who know nothing about the
question. |9
The reader also who expects to find a book on
the Frontier stuffed with "tales of wild adventure ----mostly
lies"----will not find them here. A certain amount of exciting incident
there could not help being in five years' work in a wild country, but much of
the book is a record of peaceful service. It tells of a constant struggle to
raise a stretch of Frontier 300 miles in length from a condition of incessant
war, anarchy, and oppression into a state of fairly established peace,
prosperity, and good government.
For much of the ethnological information in the
book I am indebted to The Tribes of the Hindu-Kush by Colonel
Biddulph, who was for some time in Gilgit.
Owing to the courtesy of the Editors of the Fortnightly and Contemporary, I have been enabled to make use of articles published
in their reviews, portions of which are incorporated in the book.
ALGERNON
DURAND.
1900.
CONTENTS
I. A
II. FIRST VISIT TO CHITRAL . . . . 69
III. A MONTH IN CHITRAL . . . . 107
IV. ESTABLISHMENT OF THE GILGIT AGENCY ..... 160
V. VISIT TO HUNZA NAGAR . . . 199
VI. SECOND VISIT TO CHITRAL. . . . 234
VII. DARDISTAN ..... 264
VIII. FOLK-LORE AND SPORT . . . . 278
IX. ADMINISTRATION AND WAR . . . 300
X. THE HUNZA-NAGAR EXPEDITION. . 335
XI. THE
LIST
OF ILLUSTRATIONS
COLONEL DURAND, C.B., C.I.E. Frontispiece
CROSSING A
CHITRAL FORT AND VALLEY . . .160
MAP OF THE
ABOVE NAGAR, END OF THE GREAT GLACIER ..... 256
THE BRITISH AGENT'S HOUSE, GILGIT 288
THE
IMPERIAL SERVICE TROOPS: DETACHMENT OF THE
[These face the pages above in the printed text -- in the online text, I have placed them near the same places.] THE
MAKING OF A FRONTIER
CHAPTER
I
A
THE interest which attaches to the work of
Englishmen on the borderlands of our great Empire has prompted me to write
the following plain record of work and travel in the Hindu-Kush. For four
years Warden of the Marches on the northernmost point of our Indian frontier,
it was my good fortune, in peace and war, to deal with the most primitive
races, to penetrate mountain fastnesses where the foot of a European had
never trod, and to wander through the most magnificent scenery that the eye
of man has ever looked upon. I trust, therefore, that the following pages may
give some idea of what life on the frontier really means.
The stretch of frontier to which I refer lies
south of that portion of the Himalayan range which divides |16 Chinese and Russian Turkestan and Eastern Afghanistan
from the Indian Empire. Officially it is known as the region of the Eastern
Hindu-Kush. From east to west its length is some five hundred miles; from
north to south its depth is about a hundred and fifty. It comprises the
districts and States of Baltistan or Little Thibet, Gilgit, Hunza and Nagar,
Chitral, and the
The whole of these are either directly under the
rule of, or tributary to, Kashmir, which State again is one of the most
important of the Native States of
The importance of this portion of the frontier
lies mainly in the proximity of the Russian outposts.
It is difficult of access. Gilgit, which is
roughly its centre, lies four hundred miles from the line of railway at Rawal
Pindi in the
The Sikhs, during the time they ruled Kashmir,
had been drawn into crossing the
If I have mentioned
If this is no place to discuss "the Russian
menace," still less is it to raise the vexed question of frontier
policy. I am no believer in catch-words, though they are useful as terms of
abuse. The "forward policy," and that of "masterly
inactivity," have been wrangled over quite sufficiently. No sensible man
nails either colour to his mast. Circumstances, and the races you have to do
with, decide cases. Successive Cabinets in
In the summer of 1888 an officer of the
Quarter-Master-GeneraPs Department being required by Lord Dufferin's
Government to visit Gilgit to enquire on the spot into the causes which had
led to the outbreak of hostilities between Kashmir and two of its tributary
States, Hunza and Nagar, I was fortunate enough to be selected for the duty.
Once or twice before the name of Gilgit had
appeared for a moment, to be forgotten again immediately. The adventurous
traveller,
My brother was at the time Foreign Secretary to
the Government of India, and from him at Simla I received all the information
available on the subject, and my instructions. These preliminaries completed,
I started for Gilgit.
At Rawal Pindi, the railway terminus for
From Rawal Pindi, where the rail is left, the
road into Kashmir runs for forty miles uphill to Murree, the summer
headquarters of the Punjab Military Command, and from there descends
twenty-eight miles to Kohala, in the valley of the Jhelum, which river is
here the boundary between British India and
In the summer the heat in the Jhelum valley is
very great, and though the scenery is fine, the river in a constantly
recurring series of rapids cutting its way through the gorges of the impeding
hills, there is not anything as a rule of remarkable beauty, and one's only
object is to get through the journey as quickly as possible. The last few
marches, however, are striking. The road runs below great cliffs clothed with
forest, at one time through the terraced fields of rich rice cultivation, at
another through thickets of lilac, barberry, and hazel, and at another
through the forest itself, here composed of magnificent deodars. Ruins of
Buddhist temples by the roadside----some of them of great interest, and in a
fair state of preservation----bear witness here, as do other remains on every
well-known natural line of communication throughout the Hindu-Kush and
Northern India, to the widespread power of the creed once ruling from
Kandahar and Kabul to Bengal, of which now throughout the continent of India,
scarcely a trace remains, except in time-worn stones.
The
The traveller generally leaves Baramulla in the
evening, and his barge is paddled and towed up by sunset to a spot where
boats tie up for the night. From this point, at early dawn, a start is made
to cross the
The scene as your boat steals out into the lake
an hour or more before sunrise is one never to be forgotten; many a time did
I get up to enjoy it, and each time new beauties revealed themselves. It
always reminded me of a picture of the
The journey up the river, though it offers many
beautiful views, is monotonous, and it is a relief to |24 get out of your boat occasionally, and to walk along the
bank ahead of the men towing, or to cut off bends of the river by striking
across country. In the spring the banks of the Jhelum are bordered for miles
by broad bands of purple iris, with an occasional mass of the white iris
showing the village graveyard; the air is delightful, and breathes new life
into any one who has come up from the burning plains of
The department is recruited at the bottom from
the ranks of the Indian Civil Service, and from officers of the Indian Army.
Promotion in the higher grades is not necessarily by seniority, Government
reserving itself the right to bring in suitable officers from other
departments whenever advisable. Many of the highest offices are often thus
filled, distinguished officers of the civil or military service being brought
in at the top of the tree.
Mr Chichele-Plowden, then Resident in Kashmir,
very kindly put us up in
I found the Maharaja quite satisfied with the
idea of my going to Gilgit, and, if necessary, on to Chitral, but he was very
averse to my going to Chaprot. This was the frontier fort out of which the
Kashmir garrison had been turned by the Hunza-Nagar combination during the
preceding winter, and the Maharaja had not yet heard of its having been
re-occupied by his forces. He was very averse, therefore, to my adventuring
myself north of Gilgit, and as I, on my part, had not the least anxiety to
have my throat cut, or to fall a prisoner into the hands of the tribesmen and
to bring difficulties on Government, it was agreed that my movements, after
my arrival at Gilgit, should depend on the position of the Maharaja's |29 troops and the advice of His Highness's local
authorities.
The occupation of the Gilgit district had never
paid. The Dogras had suffered heavy loss in it again and again, but the
honour of the Kashmir Durbar (the title usually applied to the government of
a native state), would not for a moment permit of withdrawal. Moreover,
withdrawal would not have answered the purpose of securing peace; it would
merely have opened, by uncovering the right bank of the Indus, a road
constantly used in former days for raiding into Baltistan or Little Thibet,
the next province on the north-east belonging to Kashmir. The remedy would
have been worse than the disease; a State which begins retiring is in the
East the natural and lawful prey of its adventurous neighbours. I found no
question of withdrawal being discussed; the attention of the Durbar was
entirely turned to securing its position on the frontier, and to retaking the
Fort of Chaprot. Throughout the winter nothing could be done, the passes
leading to Gilgit were closed by snow, but with the return of spring every
nerve had been strained to accomplish this object.
The Durbar was immensely proud of its army,
which at this time was very numerous and costly. |30 It was quite ignorant of the fact that the army was
without the very rudiments of organisation, that it was merely an unwieldy
agglomeration of units, and that its leaders, men for the most part of good
family and of fighting instincts, were one and all as innocent as the babe
unborn of the art of war. Trusting to the numbers of their troops and to the
well-known gallantry of the Dogra race, the rulers in
Ignoring the enormous natural difficulties of
the country, the villainous state of the existing tracks ----roads there were
practically none, when once the
At Bandipur we were met by two officials of the
The second of the
From Bandipur the road runs straight out of the
valley over the Tragbal pass, the highest point of which is about
twelve thousand feet. Our first camp was at an altitude of over nine thousand
feet in a glade in the pine forest, the turf covered with blue
forget-me-nots. The march up was lovely, through one succession of copses of
jasmine and scented wild rose, the latter of all colours from white to dark
red. |33 Close to the camp we came on the first signs of the army
which had preceded us----a line of graves of men who had died of
cholera. The troops and coolies were said to have suffered much from this
scourge, and we arranged to avoid their camping grounds in future. The
following morning we continued our march, the road winding up through pine
forest till the rounded tops of the watershed were reached. We halted for an
hour at the top, surrounded by a wilderness of flowers, blue gentian,
anemones, acres of white and yellow blossoms bordering the wreaths of snow,
masses of small pink alpine flowers, wild rhubarb and sorrel in profusion,
and patches of dwarf juniper, for we were well above the pine and birches.
The views from here are lovely----to the left, steep pine-clad slopes descend
into the famed Lolab valley, behind, stretched out thousands of feet below,
lie the valley of Kashmir and the blue sheet of the Woollar Lake, backed by the
snowy range of the Pir Panjal; to the right stand the great square peak and
snowfields of Haramukh; in front, a hundred miles away, towers Nanga Parbat,
from which on both hands as far as the eye can reach tossed ranges patched
with snow fill up the picture.
I had an example on reaching camp this day of
the extraordinary carrying power of the Kashmiri |34 coolie; my tent was late coming up, and when it arrived
I found one man carrying it, a large solid leather kit bag, and his own
rations. The weight was at the least a hundred and fifty pounds. I was
extremely angry, and made it very unpleasant all round, as plenty of coolies
had been arranged for. Nothing of the sort ever occurred again, but my
orderlies told me, and I saw enough to show that the report was true, that
the sepoys treated the coolies like dogs, and beat them as they would a beast
of burden. The fact is, the Kashmiri villager proper, to which class our
carriers belonged, comes of a race that has been mercilessly oppressed for
centuries by foreign Mahomedan rulers from
The next few marches are up the valley of the
Kishengunga, one of the most beautiful in
The height of the Gurais valley is about eight
thousand feet, and the climate as near perfection in spring, summer, and
autumn as can be found on earth. We habitually marched early for the sake of
the coolies, starting any time after four or five, stopping to breakfast at
some tempting spot, where we would spend most of the day reading or wandering
off the road in search of views and game, and finally reaching camp some time
in the afternoon. It was the existence of the nomad, the charm of which once
tasted works like madness in the blood, and suddenly fills the sufferer, when
mewed up within the four walls of a house, with a wild longing to be away,
wandering, it matters not where. I had my fill of it for five years, and
nothing comes up to it for pure enjoyment.
The road out of the Gurais valley is either by
the
The road requires but little description. Across
open downs or grassy slopes it was simply the footpath worn by men and
animals. In narrow valleys it wound in and out, now at the level of the
stream, again a hundred feet up, over boulders, stone staircases, and along
shelves of rock, anywhere and everywhere, so long as man and beast could find
a foothold. Perhaps a quarter of the length of the road may be said to have
been made, the rest had evidently "growed."
As we dropped down towards Astor the valley we
were in deepened, and was crowned by perpendicular cliffs broken into the
most fantastic shapes. We began now to get occasional glimpses of
The last few marches showed miles of terraced
land out of cultivation, the result of the incursions of the murderous
Chilasis who raided from the
Finally, after thirteen days' marching, we
reached Astor, which used to be the capital of a kingdom important enough in
a small way in the Hindu-Kush. The Sikhs absorbed it, all that remains of its
former glories being a fort now held by the Dogras.
Astor boasts of a bazaar, the first met with
since leaving
I here made the acquaintance of Bahadur Khan,
Raja of Astor, the representative of the old ruling race, an old gentleman
whose honesty, intimate knowledge of the country, and connection with all the |39 local rajas were to be of the greatest value to me on
more than one occasion. Deprived of his kingdom and very poor, living on a
small grant of land given to him by the Durbar, treated with contempt by the
Kashmiri Governor of Gilgit, under whom is the valley of Astor, he had the
loyalty and respect of his former subjects, who reserved for their Kashmiri
rulers the hatred, fear, and contempt begotten of oppression.
We saw at Astor for the first time polo as it is
played in what is either the home of its birth or the land of its earliest
adoption. In very few places does flat open ground exist; consequently the
polo grounds are merely terraces annexed from the cultivation, through which,
as a rule, the main road into the village runs. The Astor ground is about a
hundred and fifty yards long by twenty yards wide, and it is one of the best.
Any number of men play, the usual limit is ten-a-side, and at the beginning
of the game both sides assemble at one of the goals. When all is ready the
captain of one side, usually the local raja or the most important guest,
dashes down the ground at full speed, carrying the ball and followed by the
whole mob of players, all shouting madly; the band, which is seated outside
the boundary wall at the centre of the ground, plays its loudest, the
lookers-on |40 yell and whistle in a way a London street boy might be
proud of, and, without checking his speed for a moment, the holder of the
ball throws it into the air and hits it as it falls. The hit should be made
from the centre of the ground, and a good man will often hit a goal. A man
who is inclined to be a bit too sharp will gallop well beyond the centre
before hitting, and gain an unfair advantage. One of my worst enemies, who
murdered his brother because he was a friend of ours, who gave me endless
trouble, and finally made war on us, but on whom the hand of Fate at last
descended with crushing power, always cheated in this way. I used to think it
was very typical of his brutal, overbearing, treacherous nature.
The game is very rough and ready, and each goal
hit produces a wild mêlée, as the striker or his side must be able to
pick up the ball for the goal to count. The man who has hit the goal will
throw himself off his pony and try and pick up the ball, while the other
side, with fine impartiality, hit him or the ball, or ride over him, in their
endeavours to save the goal. Why each game does not end in sudden death and a
general free fight I could never imagine, but a serious accident is rare. In
most parts the losing side has to dance before the winners when the game is
over. As all the men |41 love
dancing, this is no great hardship. With the advent of the British Subaltern
the polo rules of the Hindu-Kush have undergone revision and improvement.
A day at Astor enabled us to rest our camp and
attend to letters. Then we started again, double marching ourselves to Doian,
the last stage before the descent into the Indus valley is made, where I
proposed to shoot for a few days in the Lechur, one of the nullahs leading
into the Indus, and good for markhor. Our camp was to go on by single marches
to Bunji, where the
The character of the mountains now began to
change completely. Below eight thousand feet hardly a tree is to be seen,
except where irrigation fertilises the lands of a village. Steep bare hillsides,
streaked with reds and ochres, but generally grey and pale sandy yellow,
covered where anything will grow with wormwood scrub, plunge down thousands
of feet into the valleys, which are only wide enough at the bottom to admit
the passage of the chafing stream. If you happen fortunately to be about the
altitude of eight to twelve thousand feet, where the rain falls, you will
march through forest and grass lands. Above that, again, run bare rock-strewn
hillsides, the last vegetation being |42 always the dwarf juniper, and from thirteen to fourteen thousand feet is the
line of eternal snow. As a rule your road runs in a valley as near the bottom
as possible; for days at a time you see no forest; when you do see it, it is
a green patch thousands of feet above you, and you only get an occasional
peep at a snow peak. Mile after mile of arid sand and rock is passed,
unrelieved by a single tree, except where a stream has cut its way from the
higher hills and piled up an alluvial fan at right angles to the main valley.
Then you find a lovely little oasis of green terraced fields running hundreds
of feet up the hillside, a village embowered in fruit-trees and vines, and
you sit down and thank God for the shade.
The march to Doian was severe; the road ran
first through scattered forest of edible pine and pencil cedar, then dropped
into the river-bed to climb, by laborious zigzags, a thousand feet to avoid a
cliff. This was repeated again and again, the road running occasionally for
miles in sand full of loose stones, the debris of the hills above. The
last ten miles of the march is, however, lovely: much of it through one of
the finest pine forests in the world, which fills an enormous bay in the
hills. The moon had risen before we reached camp, and the view, as |43 we topped the last spur and saw below us the twinkle of
the torches carried by the men coming to meet us, was one I shall never
forget. A veil of mist, flooded by brilliant moonlight, stretched across the
great abyss which yawned a thousand fathoms deep at our feet, and turned the
peaks of the Hindu-Kush, which lay before us, into visionary delectable
mountains of Beulah, barred with silvery grey.
Whatever dreams the beautiful scene evolved were
rudely dispelled. We had only the inside fly of one tent, and were sleeping
on the ground, having come as light as possible. It began to rain steadily
directly we got to bed, and poured all night. I managed to keep perfectly
dry, sleeping in an explorer's bag, but the unfortunate Robertson, with
nothing but waterproof sheets, spent the night in pools of water. We stayed
at Doian a few days, and I was lucky enough to get a fine markhor with a
forty-seven-inch head.
We moved up to a camp about eleven thousand feet
high, from which we had the most superb views. We were on a spur of Nanga
Parbat, the watershed between the
It is very rare to get a view which gives you a
range in height of twenty-two thousand feet, but when you are fortunate
enough to obtain it the effect is overpowering. The Hindu-Kush once seen in
its most majestic aspects crushes all comparison.
We spent several days in this shooting camp, and
then moved down again to Doian and started for Bunji, where the
Ramghat was a place of the greatest importance,
as the only line of communication between Gilgit, Astor, and
On this occasion we elected to try the rope bridge
for the first time. It was not nearly so alarming as it |47 looked. The bridge is made of ropes of twisted birch
twigs, each rope being about the thickness of a man's arm. Three of these
make the footway, bound together here and there by withes; the hand-rails are
similar ropes, the footway and hand-rails being fastened together by light
one-inch ropes at every six feet or so. All three sets of ropes pass over one
piece of timber set across uprights on each bank, and they are anchored as a
rule to another baulk of timber buried in loose stone masonry. Advantage is
taken of a high rock or bit of cliff for a take-off; the nearer both ends of
the bridge are to being at the same level the better, but this is not
essential, and one end may be twenty feet higher than the other. Even with
the take-off at each end on a level, the bridge sags very much in the centre;
if there is much variation in the level the pitch at one end is necessarily
much steeper than at the other, and at either end there is a very decided slope.
This is trying for a tall man, for the nearer to the anchorages the shallower
the V made by the ropes, and in order to get hold of the side-ropes
you must stoop forward very much, which is apt to be unpleasant when you
necessarily look down and see, sixty feet below you, hard rocks. Once you get
above the water all feeling of discomfort passes off, and in the hot weather
it is |48 pleasant to stand leaning your back against the
side-rope, swaying in the wind, and facing the cold air which rushes down
above the centre of these ice-fed torrents. In order to prevent the
side-ropes getting close together they are kept apart by sticks inserted at
every few yards, over which you have to step. This is rather an acrobatic
performance, as in the middle of the bridge the side ropes are two-and-a-half
to three feet above the foot rope, but you soon get used to it. Every one
crosses these bridges, old women, children, men carrying any loads, alive or
dead. Some dogs negotiate them quite easily, but many get frightened and lie
down, half way and have to be picked up. We had one pariah, who followed us
from
From Ramghat the road runs for eight miles over
an open sloping plain bordering the
The Bunji plain now holds but a small fort,
commanding the ferry six hundred feet below, and a patch of cultivation. It
only wants water brought on to it to make it blossom like the rose. But the
climate is not pleasant; the heat in summer all down the
At Astor we had begun to hear rumours of the
heavy losses the
We crossed the river next day. It was running
three hundred yards wide, a very mill race, with huge waves boiling over deep
hidden rocks in the centre of its course. We crossed on a large raft, about
eight feet by ten, made of a light framework of wood and bamboo, floated on
half-a-dozen inflated bullock skins. It was a most exhilarating performance;
once you had pushed out from the shore and began rowing, the raft was caught
in the stream, and went dancing madly down, tossed in all directions by the
waves, the men pulling for their lives so as to avoid being |52 swept past the landing-place and through the heavy
rapids below. A few minutes of racing down-stream, and you pulled into
quieter water on the opposite side, some hundreds of yards lower down than
you started. All our kit, guard, etc., crossed in the boats, a much more
dangerous performance, unless most carefully watched, for the Kashmir
officials had never realised that the flat-bottomed boats, suitable to the
navigation of the
The road led up from the
We passed on the road a group of Balti coolies,
who threw themselves at my horse's feet in a body, and prayed for help. There
was nothing I could do |54 for
them at the moment, though the mere fact that I enquired into their
grievances had, as I afterwards heard, a good effect, and got them dismissed
to their homes, but Robertson stopped behind to see what a little doctoring
could do. It was not much; the men, fifty-three in number, were the remains
of a body of a hundred coolies who had left Baltistan six months before, impressed
by the Kashmir authorities as transport for the army assembling at Gilgit;
they were, to a man almost, suffering from diarrhoea and dysentery brought on
by overwork and bad food, and several were dying, the worst cases being
placed by the runnel of an irrigation channel, close enough to reach the
water with their hands. This was all the help their companions could give
them. Forty men of the original band were said to have died, the remainder
were being slowly worked to death, and were then being taken to Bunji to
bring up grain to Gilgit for the troops. One poor wretch had a hole in his
back where his load had worn away the flesh. The whole thing was sickening;
war is bad enough at any time, but mismanaged war is hell.
In the evening we moved further up the Sai
stream to Chakarkot, another pretty little camp in the village orchards.
The next three marches to Gilgit were at that
time |55 horrible, through a howling wilderness; for nearly
twenty miles there was not a drop of water, except when the road dipped right
down to the bank of the Gilgit river, and that was running thick and slab
like gritty cocoa. Up and down over spurs of hills, into gaping ravines, now
at the level of the river, now a thousand feet up, along cliffs glaring and
blazing in the sun, the miserable path ran on. Going free and comfortable as
we were, it was easy to realise what such a road meant to laden coolies or
troops. Once we had some rain at night, and were treated on a small scale to
one of the most curious phenomena to be met with in this weird country,
namely, the mud flow, which forms the alluvial fan.
If you stand high up on a mountain side, in any
part of the Hindu-Kush, and look up or down the valley, you will always see
projecting into it, at varying intervals, usually making an angle of from ten
to fifteen degrees with the river level, and invariably at an entirely
different slope to that of the main hillsides, a series of fan-shaped spurs,
poured out as it were from the mountains behind. These are the alluvial fans
on which in almost all cases the first cultivation in a valley commences, and
from which, if there is flat ground round their bases and enough water is
available, the cultivation extends. The fans |56 are formed by streams draining the inner mountains which
have cut their way through the hills forming the main valleys. They are
composed of boulder clay, and show very often distinct traces of
stratification. Rain rarely falls below an altitude of eight thousand feet in
these parts, and the streams as a rule can cope with the drainage from the
hills. But in the spring, when the heavy melt of snow commences, and when
consequently the hills above that level are for days together clothed in mist
and drenched with rain; or in summer when, after ten days of brilliant
weather, a three days' storm rages and the fountains of heaven are opened on
the higher hills, the streams cannot drain the hillsides sufficiently
quickly. They become heavy with mud, loosened boulders crash into them and
are swept down, the main ravine becomes more and more choked as the tributary
streams pour in, and at last in a solid mass forty, fifty, sixty feet deep,
it pours its stream of mud, out of the hills into the river valley, the
stream at once expanding as it leaves the embrace of the enclosing cliffs. In
this way every fan has been formed, the stream which made it cutting its way
through its own fan to reach the river. The mud flow of which we saw the
traces was a mere baby; it had only covered rocks ten feet high in the stream
bed, and made a miniature fan where it |57 debouched, but its force was attested by the huge boulders it had moved.
These mud flows come down with terrible rapidity and irresistible force, and
with no further warning than a tremble of the ground like an earthquake and a
grinding roar, followed immediately by the wall of mud and rock: man or beast
caught in a ravine by them is lost. The peculiar formation so common in the
Hindu-Kush by which a stream, with a catchment area "perhaps thirty to
fifty miles round, cuts its way into the main river through a gorge fifty
feet wide, with walls several hundred feet in height, is what makes these mud
flows possible and so dangerous. No one who had not had his attention drawn
to them would believe in their action. When making the road down to Chilas in
1893 I found a bridge being built over a ravine apparently in a perfectly
safe situation about thirty feet above the bed. The engineer in charge would
not believe that it could be unsafe till I showed him on the cliffs not fifty
yards from the bridge traces of a mud flow, which I knew was only a year or
so old, some thirty feet higher than his bridge site.
About twelve miles from Gilgit we passed lines
of sungahs, stone breast-works, following the edge of the cliff above the
river, and blocking the ravine heads leading into it, and asked their
meaning. The |58 road at this point dropped into the river bed, and led
for a few hundred yards along a flat sandy bank by the water's edge. We were
told that the place was called "the fort of Bhoop Singh," from a
One could see the tragedy; the wretched men
under a plunging fire, with inaccessible cliffs above them, and a raging
torrent in front of them, badly equipped, badly led, and with nothing but
death or worse staring them in the face. It was a useful reminder to all
soldiers passing by. I never rode through the place without feeling the
horror of the long past days of agony, and without having the difficulties
and dangers of campaigning in such a country |59 forcibly brought in on me. It would have saved us many a
life before some years were over had all ranks, British and native, taken the
lesson to heart. But it was not to be: each generation must apparently make
the same mistakes, men will be reckless, and some apparently can only buy
experience with the wasted blood of their men, and gain common-sense for
themselves when it comes to them hand-in-hand with death.
The approach to Gilgit is rather fine. The road
runs up the flank of a huge alluvial fan several hundred feet in depth, where
it bursts out of the hillside, and which stretches a mile into the valley.
From the east as you approached you saw then no trace of cultivation, only
line after line of ruined terraced fields bare and brown. High up on the main
hillside, visible for miles, stands a Buddhist tower, the land-mark which
must for centuries have welcomed the traveller to Gilgit. The extraordinary dryness
of the climate, with its average rainfall of under a couple of inches a year,
has kept it, ancient as it is, in a state of almost perfect preservation.
From the. highest point where the road crosses
the fan there is a splendid view of the triple peaks of Rakapushi, the great
mountain above Nagar to the north, and the Gilgit oasis bursts into view.
This is |60 a mass of cultivation five or six miles long by a mile
wide at the widest, studded with villages and covered with fruit-trees, the
whole irrigated and depending for its water on one stream which enters the
valley at the western end.
I was met on the road at intervals by all the
important men in Gilgit; the lower the status of the official the further he
came out, according to Eastern custom, to receive me. The rajas of Punyal,
the country tributary to Kashmir, which is the continuation of the valley of
the Gilgit river towards Chitral, refugee princes from Yasin, driven out by
the Mehtar of Chitral, local wazirs and Kashmir officials met me one after
the other, the culminating point being my reception by the Governor of Gilgit
and the officers of the Committee directing the operations on the frontier.
It was a motley crowd and picturesque, but I was glad when, after passing the
fort, we were conducted to the house built in Major Biddulph's day, and left
there in peace.
The next few days were spent in making
acquaintance with the Governor and the members of the Committee, which
consisted of the General commanding at Gilgit, the General commanding the
regular reinforcements, the Sunadés or officer commanding the irregular
troops, and of a couple of high |61 civil
officials, the most important of all being Mehta Sher Singh, an old gentleman
of high family and position in Kashmir. The ablest among these gentlemen was,
perhaps, the Governor, who had held his post for eight years, was heartily
sick of it, and was most anxious to settle matters with Hunza and Nagar
somehow, and to be permitted to return to
My position was difficult; I had distinct orders
not to give advice, but I could see very well that, if the negotiations going
on failed, the Committee would come to me for it, and that whatever decision
they came to, the onus would be thrown on me. Every endeavour was of course
made to throw dust in my eyes, and to prevent my getting information as to
what had really happened, why the tribes had broken out, what was going on at
the moment, and as to the condition of the troops. I was told, however, and I
knew the information was true, that between Astor and Nomal, the fort
eighteen miles north of Gilgit, then the last
I have before described the want of system which
existed, so I was not surprised at what I saw en route and at Gilgit.
Here I found the
If from the military point of view things were
bad, from the civil they were no better. The Durbar was robbed by every
official from the highest to the lowest; granaries that should have been full
of good grain were empty, or full of rubbish substituted for a consideration,
bribery and corruption ruled the land, disloyalty and treachery were in its
high places. The man to send warning to the Hunza-Nagar forces, when after
the capture of Chaprot they had advanced south and were besieging Nomal, the
last Kashmir fort between them and Gilgit, of the advance of the
A fortnight at Gilgit put me in full possession
of the leading facts bearing on the existing difficulties, which may be
summarised as follows:----Hunza was extremely difficult of attack, and
practically could have but little pressure brought to bear on it, having
exits to the north on to the Pamirs. It could get |65 all its luxuries from Kashgar and Yarkand, and had some
connection with
And here, perhaps, will be a fitting place to |66 point out more clearly the importance of Gilgit It is a
poor valley, separated from
That a thousand Cossacks could not hold Kashmir
is very true, but think what the effect in
CHAPTER
II
FIRST
VISIT TO CHITRAL
AFZUL-UL-MULK, second son of the Mehtar or King
of Chitral, who had passed the winter in a visit to India, and had been in
Kashmir as I passed through, now arrived in Gilgit, and came to see me. He
was generally known in Chitral as the Tsik Mehtar, or little Mehtar, his
elder brother Nizam-ul-Mulk, in consideration of being heir-apparent, having
the title of Sirdar. He was a good-looking young man with beautiful eyes and
well-shaped face, the mouth being the bad part, the lower lip of which was
heavy. It was the family feature, borne by every Katúr, as the clan of the
ruling family was called. Colonel Lockhart had taken a great fancy to
Afzul-ul-Mulk, and he had certainly a taking personality. Bright, cheery, of
an enquiring turn of mind, talking Persian fluently, as does every gentleman
in the Hindu-Kush, interested in everything he had seen in India, realising
what the British power meant better |70 than
his father, who had never left Chitral, and extravagantly loyal, open-handed,
courteous to all, young, handsome, hospitable, a good shot, and, for a
Chitrali, a fine rider, it would have been curious if he had failed to be
popular. But there was a different side to his character, as I very soon
learnt. At heart he was a pure savage, a mixture of the monkey and the tiger.
Loyal from calculation, and from hopes of being recognised by Government as
the heir-apparent, he was, under his cloak of open bonhomie, generosity, and
transparent honesty, the most persistent plotter, and the most treacherous
and ruthless foe. At his father's death, he very naturally seized the throne,
and his elder brother fled the country, defeated by superior powers of
intrigue. But with all his cunning Afzul-ul-Mulk was a fool. He tried to
strike terror by cutting down the leading men; he cut down too many or too
few. The cold-blooded and treacherous murder of three brothers would have
passed with little comment, the death of leading adherents of his brother was
natural, but the announcement that a list of head men existed, who were to be
killed, and the uncertainty as to whose turn was to come next, were too much.
A carefully prepared plot, hatched in
However, at the moment, everything was rosy. No
shadows of coming events chilled us, and I gladly arranged to accept the
Mehtar's invitation to visit his country, so courteously delivered by Afzul.
It was decided that he should move on ahead of me, as he took up a great deal
of carriage, and that he should await me at Mastuj, the headquarters of the
district he governed. I wanted a few days to arrange about my carriage, and
to take farewell of my Kashmiri friends, to each one of whom I had to make a
present of more or less value on the part of Government.
We were not sorry to start; the valley was
horribly hot and unhealthy, the rice cultivation in full swing, the fields a
sea of putrid water, cholera was more or less all round us, and. we had both
been rather out of sorts. The measures taken to stop the cholera were
curious. No attention was paid to such trifles as water-supply or sanitation,
but morning and evening the Brahmins used to march round the camps of the
troops, blowing conch-shells and invoking their gods, a plan which, however
effective against the walls of
We found the country we marched through to
Gakuch, the last fort in Punyal, and for many marches beyond, wilder than
anything we had yet seen. For the most part the road runs through a narrow
valley just wide enough to give room for a roaring torrent sixty to eighty
yards across, with an average fall of forty feet to the mile, the valley here
and there opening out and showing alluvial fans and patches of cultivation.
The two most marked features of the road for a hundred miles from Gilgit, and
practically throughout the Hindu-Kush, are shingle slopes and the
"parris." Thousands of feet above you are the mountain tops,
shattered by frost and sun into the most fantastic outlines, from whose
rugged summits fall masses of rock. Below any precipice you consequently see
the shingle slope in existence; these slopes sometimes running up thousands
of feet at a steep unbroken angle, almost universally of thirty degrees. The
sizes of the stones forming the slope vary with the character of the rock and
the length of the fall. You may pass through the foot of a slope by a path
running over and amongst a heap of gigantic fragments weighing many tons
each, or you may ride across a slope of fine slatey shingle which gives at
every step, but wherever you cross a slope you |73 generally find all the stones at that point very much
the same size. Whenever there is heavy rain, or snow begins to melt in the
spring, rock avalanches come down, and I have lain at nights for hours
listening to the thundering roar of great fragments plunging down from
thousands of feet above one's camp. In the day-time you have to keep a sharp
look-out when marching. There are many places well-known as extremely
dangerous, in crossing which it is prudent not to loiter. I have never seen a
man killed, but I have seen a man's leg broken a few yards in front of me by
a falling stone, and have witnessed very narrow escapes. There was one
particularly nasty stone shoot at Shaitan Nara, where stones fell all day
long, the smaller whizzing by like a bullet, and the larger cannonading down
in flying leaps, the last of which frequently carried them nearly across the
A "parri" is a cliff, across the face
of which the road is carried. These cliffs constantly occur, either where the
hills close in on the river, or where a long alluvial fan projects into its
bed. Rising sheer from |74 the
water in such cases you find generally a precipice of conglomerate. One path
is carried across the face of the cliff, a second rises over it. The former,
or lower path, is never more than a foot or so wide. Taking advantage of a
ledge in the rock here, supported on pegs driven into its face there, carried
across a bad place on a single shaky plank or light bundle of tamarisk,
ascending fifty feet up a cleft in the rock by a series of small tree-trunks
notched to give a foothold, and polished by years of use, the lower path is
impossible for animals, and is exclusively used by men on foot, whether
carrying loads or not. There is often a sheer drop of a hundred feet from the
path on to the rocks below, but I never saw a really dangerous place. Our
coolies and servants habitually used the lower paths, and I have had mountain
guns carried over some of the worst, in order to give the men confidence in
bad ground. The upper path toils laboriously up in endless zigzags till it
surmounts the cliff, and drops in the same way to meet the lower path on the
far side. This is the riding road, and that by which laden animals go; but
though you can, and do, ride over these paths, there are very few marches
where you can take laden animals along without constant unloading. Many of
these "parris" make capital defensive positions, and have been |75 fought on scores of times: the lower path can be
entirely destroyed in a couple of minutes by knocking away a few pegs, and
the upper path is commanded at a dozen places by carefully placed sungahs.
I had to halt several days at Gakuch, forty
miles from Gilgit, to wait for my Balti coolies, who were to follow me, and I
spent the time in cultivating the acquaintance of Raja Akbar Khan, the Chief
of Punyal, and his brothers and cousins. Fine fellows, magnificent mountaineers,
who were later, under us, to prove "tall men of their hands."
The climate was perfect after Gilgit. We were
camped in an apricot orchard, at an altitude of seven thousand feet and over,
and the delicious air soon set us up.
Gakuch fort and its cultivation stand high,
seven hundred feet or so above the river bed. The formation is curious; the
hills, in one fine slope from the snows, sweep out till they finish in an
almost sheer cliff into the river, the last few hundred yards before the
cliff is reached being comparatively flat. Through this level portion project
great rounded masses of rock, water-worn and full of "pot-holes,"
the remains of glacial action. It looks as if, at some remote period, a huge
glacier had flowed down the Ishkuman, and had swept to its left down the
Gilgit valley. These |76 rounded hillocks were full of chikor, the mountain partridge, which gave us
good sport. In one of them is a cave reputed to be fathomless----really, I
suppose, about twenty feet deep----heaped up with human bones. It was said to
have been filled by a former ruler of Yasin, and a terror to his neighbours,
whose bloodthirsty nature gained him the title of Adam khor, "the
man-eater."
During my halt at Gakuch, Sirdar Nizam-ul-Mulk,
the Mehtar's eldest son, who ruled Yasin, and who was to meet me just across
the border, bombarded me with letters, and a curious incident occurred with
one of his letter carriers. When I handed this man my answer to Nizam's
letter, I gave him, as usual, a present, in this case a small round
looking-glass in a brass cover, a thing much prized in these parts. He
declined to receive it, and said the last man had got five rupees and a
knife, and that he would not take less. It would have been impossible to
carry on if I allowed myself to be rushed for presents in this way, so I
dismissed him, and sending for the Mehtar's half-brother, who was
accompanying me, explained the man's impertinence to him. The result was
startling; the old gentleman was furious, said that, had we been in Chitral
territory, he would have cut the man to pieces at |77 once, and that the Mehtar would certainly, if he heard
of it, kill the man and sell his wife and children for slaves. I interceded
for him, and he got off without punishment, but it gave one an idea of how
the Mehtar ruled, and why he was obeyed as he was.
Nizam-ul-Mulk met us the first march across the
border, and was with us a couple of days. He was a handsomer man than his
brother, but had the same heavy under-lip. His manners were charming, but his
morals, like those of almost every leading man in the country, excepting the
Mehtar, Afzul, and one or two others, left much to be desired. He was a worse
governor than Afzul, a mixture of cruelty, indolence, and good-nature, but he
was popular too in his way, being a fine shikari. He was always accompanied
by his dancing and singing boys, without whom he would move nowhere, and he
was consequently an intolerable nuisance on the march, as they kept up their
music right through the night. During his first interview with me he rather
embarrassed us by asking, after a pause in the conversation, during which he
had been fixedly staring at Robertson, whether the latter was a really good
doctor. You had to be prepared to receive any question or statement with an
impassive face, |78 a feat at first a
little difficult, for Chitrali views of life were quaint.
Nizam mentioned casually that he had sold forty
of his people into slavery this year, and explained that he had selected them
from houses in which there were several men, so that it would make no
difference in cultivating the land, an arrangement which he seemed to think
showed a good deal of consideration. Afzul, when discussing the slavery
question later with me, pointed out that in India we could afford to keep up
jails, but that in a poor country like Chitral this was impossible, and that
selling into slavery answered to our penal servitude; it was the only way of
punishing a man who was too much of a scoundrel to be allowed at large. If
selling into slavery had been ruled by these conditions, there might not have
been so much to say against it in a country in the condition of Chitral, but
this was not the case. The Mehtar and his sons looked upon selling men into
slavery as a natural source of revenue, and they took every opportunity they
could of making money in this way. The market value of an able-bodied man was
about a hundred rupees, a good-looking young woman ran up to two hundred or
two hundred and fifty, a boy or a girl was usually worth a horse, and |79 could be got for from forty to eighty-five rupees, an
old man was worth a good sporting dog or a donkey, but I never heard the
value of an old woman quoted. I lived in perpetual terror of being presented
with a slave, and was prevented by this and other obvious
considerations----one being that I did not want spies in my household----from
attempting to start Chitrali servants, which was a loss when later I wanted
to learn something of the language.
Throughout Chitral on this occasion I was not
allowed to pay for any supplies. As my camp was very small, this was no great
tax, and I tried to make up for it by giving presents. I found that the ruler
and his guests were always supplied with food and firewood, and that this
levy really took the place of part of the land tax, and that in some places
it was the sole cess on land. In theory, it is a perfectly natural and
harmless tax in a wild country like Chitral, but in practice it is bad, as
the strong man in a village does not produce his own milk or sheep when the
king's camp comes along and has to be fed, but takes those of his poorer
neighbour, and presents them, with protestations of joy and loyalty. When I
visited Chitral again, or officers under my orders did so in after years, it
was always the rule that all supplies and carriage |80 should be paid for by a British officer in person. In
the case of coolies this ensured the right man getting the money, but with
supplies one was never certain of paying the rightful owner, and, in any
case, the strong man armed took his share. That we could not help, you cannot
alter the immemorial East; all that we could do was to make it evident to the
people that we wanted to pay honestly for whatever we took, and that we were
not on the side of oppression. The result was natural----the slaves and
labouring classes liked us; the Adamzadas or nobles, who thought all the
money should go to them, hated the sight of us.
The next point in our journey was Mastuj, a
hundred and twenty miles from Gakuch, and the capital of Afzul's government.
Afzul met me a march from it, and it was a pleasure, after passing some days
in marching through Nizam's country, where such luxuries were unheeded, to
get into his territory, and to find roads improved and cleared of stones so
far as possible, and bridges repaired.
There was plenty of interest on the road: the
first five or six marches from Gakuch were much as usual, over the most
dreadful ground, but after that the valley opened a little. An extract from
my diary for one day will give an idea of the road:---- |81 "The road very stony, in many places passing over
the rocky débris slopes from the cliffs above, and going for some
distance over nothing but broken rocks of all sizes: in fact, yesterday and
to-day we have been riding gaily over places I should be afraid to lead an
English horse over, but my 'Badakshani,' given me by Nizam, with his unshod
feet goes over them as smoothly as a cat. We came by the lower road, along a
small 'parri,' about three miles back, which is, I think, the most dangerous
bit of road we have seen. For twenty yards or so you go along a sort of ledge
of polished rock, with inequalities here and there where you can put
your feet, and there is a clean drop below you of a hundred feet. All the
coolies with loads use it, so that no one without a load ought to mind
it."
Still, however bad the track, so long as a man
stuck to the riding road he stuck to his horse; nowhere in the world, I
should think, do men habitually ride over such awful ground, and yet the
Chitrali is no horseman, but then he has no nerves. I used to get off the
first few days after leaving Gilgit at particularly vile places, but when I
found that this entailed every one doing the same, and that the men of the
country would not have thought of dismounting, I saw this would never do, and |82 I put a horseman in front to show the way, and followed
till he got off. It was a liberal education, and my heart used to be in my
mouth when my inner leg would be brushing the cliff and the outer hanging
over eternity. The only time a native ever got off was to use the short cut
of a "parri" himself, if it were really a very short distance to
walk, and so preferable to the longer riding road, to ascend or descend some
obviously impossible rock staircase---- they counted about half a dozen of
these between Gilgit and Chitral, ordinary mortals would have counted as many
hundreds----or to get round some corner where the road ran over polished
rock, and where it was considered advisable to hang on to the horse's tail to
prevent his quarters going over the edge. I always hated riding over these
roads, but it is wonderful what you can do if you make up your mind, and we
gave them a most exhaustive and impartial trial.
At Chashi the valley opens out, three streams
meeting here----one from Yasin to the north, and one from the mountains above
Tangir to the south, joining the main valley. Riding up you seemed to be
coming to a cul-de-sac, a broad low hill, the terminal moraine of a
glacier, which must have filled the valley to the west, completely barring it
from |83 side to side. Above this lay the Pandur lake. Below this
hill the valley stretches away well cultivated, the foreground filled with
low masses of rock and small hills, whose rounded tops and smooth and
polished rocks tell of a glacier action. Here and during the next march I saw
splendid crops of bearded wheat, the finest we had yet come across.
We were met at Chashi by Rahim-ut-Ullah Khan,
the Mehtar's Governor of the Ghizr district, a fine-looking, tall man, with
dignified manners. He was one of the Mehtar's most trusted adherents, but he
had a deservedly evil reputation. He was the man said to have been employed
in the murder of poor
The Pandur lake when we passed it was very beautiful,
a sheet of water about six miles in length by a mile in width. The shores are
quite bare, the mountain to the north coming sheer down into the lake, while
the southern shore, along which runs the road, is formed by very steep-sided
flat-topped spurs jutting out from the mountains which lie some way back. The
view was lovely, the water, which was of a peculiar opal tint, taking the
most beautiful colouring from sky and cloud, and giving perfect reflections
of the hills and islands. The wild duck on it floated double, duck and
shadow, and kept carefully out of shot. Above the Pandur lake, and close to
Ghizr, the road was prettier than anything since
One thing disappointed me very much in the
country, and that was the paucity of remains of archaeological interest. Here
and there you see an undoubted Buddhist tope, though, curiously enough, I do
not think that a single piece of Buddhist masonry, such as you would find in
any other portion of the frontier, exists in any fort or road embankment.
There is not one single inscription in the whole country, except one found by
Colonel Lockhart |86 between Mastuj and
Chitral commemorating the invasion of a Chinese army. I hunted the country
high and low, promised rewards, did all I knew to get information, and the
Chitralis would have shown us anything, for they are no bigots, but I never
found the trace of an inscription. There are no buildings of historical
interest, there were no written records, but there is a wonderful folk-lore
which, I am sure, will repay research. It is rapidly being ruined by
Mahomedanism, and in a few years, I am afraid, many of the old beliefs and
legends will have passed away, but it was a mine of wealth which I had no
time to explore.
Throughout the country are traces of past
inhabitants, the remains of rock-built villages, attributed to the Kafirs,
perched on some almost inaccessible crag, great circular enclosures, looking
like gigantic sheepfolds, the reputed halting-places of Moghul armies, but so
far from water that they cannot have been fortifications, and circles of
stones pointing to dead worships. But all these are of the rudest type and
construction, and in no case, search however closely, did I find trace of an
inscription or of carving. In one place cup markings on a rock built into a
wall caught my eye, but I was at the moment being swept along in the centre
of a |87 cavalcade of Chitralis who had come to receive me, and I
could not stop. I hunted for this stone again many times, but never found it,
and, in any case, cup markings are an enigma. The only attempt I ever saw at
sculpture was the production, in outline, chipped through the glazed weather
surface of rocks, of the figures of animals, generally markhor and ibex. I
examined a great many of these carefully, but it was extremely difficult to
arrive at any satisfactory conclusion as to their age. Some were evidently
very ancient, others may have been quite modern, though I must say I never
found one fresh cut. The curious thing to me was that I never found the
figure of a man or horse. I never got any satisfactory explanation about
them, but they are probably the outcome of a desire to pass the time on the
part of shepherd, sentry, or mere idler.
We crossed over to Mastuj by the Shandur pass,
at an altitude of over twelve thousand feet, camping on the top of the pass,
which is a flat plateau with lakes on it The line of mountains over
which the pass leads is the connecting link, the only one, between the
Hindu-Kush and the Hindu Raj ranges. The march from Ghizr to the top of the
Shandur is easy, through a broad valley filled with willow and with scattered
birch. We passed the road to Mastuj |88 by
the Chamarkand, which we were to use later. The cold on the Shandur was felt
a good deal by our men, and this was not to be wondered at, for when we got
to our camp, at about four in the afternoon, an icy wind was blowing, and the
thermometer was at forty----a few days before at the same time it had stood
at a hundred and fifteen in the shade! In the winter the pass is very cold,
but generally practicable. We found black-currant bushes on one side of the
pass but no fruit.
Afzul-ul-Mulk's Deputy Governor, Abdulla Khan,
met us on the Shandur. He was one of the most picturesque of all the Chitrali
nobles, and on this occasion was dressed in a loose "choga," a garment
cut like a dressing-gown, of gold brocade, covered with a pattern of large
tea roses and bouquets of smaller flowers. The Chitrali always wears a small
turban; he was no exception, but his was almost entirely gold. His under coat
was of the brightest Bokhara silk; his loose bright green velvet breeches
were stuffed into long
Between the foot of the pass and Mastuj the
ground was much the same as before, and I noted a formidable position which
Afzul said was always held against an enemy coming from the south. A few
years later it was held by the Chitralis against Kelly's force, which was
advancing to the relief of Robertson, who was besieged in Chitral.
Mastuj we found a horrible place. The valley is
much broader than usual, and at one time probably held much cultivation;
there is but little now. The fort is close to the junction of the Laspur
valley, down which we had come, and the main valley, and we camped a mile
beyond it, at the far end of the polo ground. Mastuj is about the windiest
place I know; being at the junction of three large valleys there is always a
wind, generally a gale.
In Afzul's territory we first saw the Chitralis
show off on the "janáli," the exercise ground, which belongs to
every fair-sized village. We used to be taken to this before reaching our
camp, and had to sit for some time, either on our horses or on the ground,
watching various feats of arms. A high pole is set up, on the top of which
are fixed gourds, |90 sometimes silver
globes full of dust, and man after man dashes by at full gallop and fires at
these marks. They load their guns as a rule with a cylinder of wood instead
of a bullet, though a handful of fine pebbles, or a charge of shot if they
can get it, does not come amiss. The latter practice is not regarded as quite
fair. The mark is occasionally hit, the prize going to the lucky marksman.
Sometimes you are treated to an exhibition of archery, the riders flying by
and shooting at a mark on a mound of earth. The bows are very strong, being
made of markhor horn, but the shooting is, as a rule, of the poorest. This
sort of thing, though interesting when you first see it, becomes very
wearisome when you are constantly called on to sit in a hot sun for an hour
or more after a long march to watch it. But the humours of the scene were
various. Afzul fairly took my breath away one day during the performance by
calling to one of his attendant courtiers, and by blowing his nose on the end
of the latter's turban. Here we first got the splendid white grape, reserved
for the royal family. It almost equals the finest muscatel grown in an
English hothouse. Properly cultivated, it would be about the best grape in
the world. It is said to have been imported from
Our reception at Mastuj was very striking. Afzul
had joined us the day before, and had with him some hundred and fifty mounted
men, who formed an irregular bodyguard. They were ablaze with colour; their
chogas of gold kinkob, green and blue velvets, gorgeous silks of
We had our first Chitrali dinner at Mastuj, and
excellent it was. It was served under the great plane tree which shaded the
gate of the fort, on a raised platform running round the trunk. This must
have been the place of gossip and assembly for the last two hundred years or
more. The dinner consisted of pillaus of all sorts, one excellent pillau of
beef being on a huge dish, three feet across, piled high with rice. The drink
was water cooled with snow. After dinner we were given little cups of tea,
with salt in it instead of sugar, a most atrocious mixture. I barely tasted
mine, but Robertson, who had insisted on our dining à la Chitrali, using
our fingers for forks, a most unpleasant and greasy proceeding, drank the
whole of his at a draught. He was no companion to me for the rest of the day.
After breakfast was over Afzul came out and gave
us the usual presents----horses, pieces of Bokhara silk, caps and waist-belts
embroidered by the women of his household. By the time I left Chitral I had a
string of about twenty horses of sorts, most of them dreadful screws, but
useful on the march to mount orderlies and servants. I got rid of a good many
in presents on my way down through Punyal, and |93 the rest were sold, together with all other presents
received, in
We remained at Mastuj about a week to give the
Mehtar time to make his preparations for receiving me, to get a little
shooting, and to rest our camp. Afzul also was most pressing for us to stay,
thinking that every day he spent with me was another nail in Nizam's coffin,
another step towards getting the Government of India to recognise him, and
not his elder brother, as heir-apparent. Needless to say, Government had not
the remotest intention of interfering in any way in the matter.
We beguiled the time during our enforced
idleness by moving up the valley and visiting the Chamar-kand. This pass
leads into the valley we had come by above Ghizr. I had originally meant to
use it, but did not owing to the weather: it is in some ways more difficult
than the Shandur. The road leading into it from the Mastuj valley winds
through a narrow gorge cut through clay, the sides being carved out by water
action into the wildest collection of pinnacles and ravines imaginable, with
numerous balanced rocks. We came out very light, and I left my personal
servants behind. The consequence was |94 that
my orderlies put up my camp bed, an English "paragon," without
fitting the joints properly, and it smashed irretrievably directly I sat on
it. For the next two months I slept on the ground, and in cold weather, when
there are no centipedes about, or other horrors, there is no doubt that it is
far the most comfortable arrangement, and very much warmer than a bed. My
orderlies used to get a lot of bhoosa, the broken straw from
the threshing floors, and put a foot of it down all over the floor of the
tent, stretch my tent carpet over this, and put down the bedding on the top
of all. In real cold this makes the most perfect sleeping-place; there is no
gale of icy wind blowing about under you as is usually the case if you have a
bed; it is a soft, warm, elastic nest with no draughts.
We had been brought out by Afzul to see the
national sport of shooting markhor or ibex over dogs. Long before sunrise one
morning we were riding up the valley, our point being the ground between the
junction of two small ravines at an altitude of ten thousand feet. A cutting
wind blew in our faces, and it was bitterly cold till sunrise, when the wind
dropped, and was soon blowing gently uphill. This behaviour of the wind is
universal except in rainy and cloudy weather, and is of great assistance to
the |95 stalker. Leaving your camp or sleeping-place under a
rock,, one, two, or three hours before sunrise, according to the height you
are at, and the height you wish to reach, you toil uphill. By sunrise you are
well above the game, which in another hour or so, after feeding, will also
begin moving uphill; the wind, by that time blowing from them to you, is in
your favour. The uniform slope of the gigantic mountain sides, the generally
uniform character of the ravines which cut straight down the hill, tend to
make the wind very steady, and you have few of the exasperating shifts which
you would expect at home. The moment that cloud and mist envelop your
stalking ground, however, the conditions change, and the wind becomes as
treacherous and catchy as elsewhere. Advantage is taken of the wind in
hunting with dogs. They are let out an hour before dawn and are hunted along
the base of a line of hills in which game is supposed to harbour. The moment
the dogs get the scent they are off, lost sight of immediately in the dark,
and as they run mute it is hours perhaps before they are found. They are
admirably trained, or their instinct prompts them to do exactly the right
thing. Dashing silently along, in a few minutes they rouse the game, ibex or
markhor----if the former, it will take uphill, if the |96 latter, probably down; but in all cases the point is
some fastness in the rock, where the mountain goat feels at home, and where
its instinct tells it no enemy, snow leopard or hunting dog, dare rush into
the attack. The game once driven into bad ground of this sort, the dogs bay
it, and the shikari, led by his hounds' voices, comes up and gets the shot.
Good dogs will remain twenty-four hours----it is said they have been known to
remain longer----baying a herd of markhor or ibex. The Chitralis assured me
that if the game is caught in open ground, a good set of dogs were able to
round them up like sheep and keep them from moving. This I had no opportunity
of seeing.
We sat for some hours waiting for news of our
dogs, and I beguiled the time by showing Afzul and his men the use of a
burning glass with the lens of my field-glasses which I was cleaning. Afzul
was delighted, seized the glass, and at once proceeded to burn a hole in the
back of one of his followers' hands. In the midst of our trifling came the
news that the dogs had found game, and there was mounting in hot haste, and a
ride of about three thousand feet straight uphill over ground that had been
carved out by glaciers centuries ago, moraines now covered with grass and
scanty scrub. Finally |97 we
arrived close to a glacier, its face reflecting the early sun, and showing
the most glorious colours, but we had no time to admire this at the moment We
had been riding over ground which I should have said was absolutely
impossible for horses; it was steeper than the roof of most houses, and but
for its soft and shaley character, no horse ever foaled could have carried a
man up it. At the top of the last steep pitch we found ourselves on the edge
of a moraine, and a couple of hundred yards from us on the main mountain side
were half a dozen dogs baying an ibex, which they had driven on to a niche a
foot square in the face of a precipice. There was no way down even for an
ibex, the crack in the cliff he had come down was now guarded by two savage
hounds, who dashed at him and drove him back if he tried to ascend. It was a
picturesque sight, but a sad one, the ibex now standing facing despairingly
out from the cliff, and then turning and trying to force his way up, butting
at the dogs as they barred his way, only to be driven back every time.
Getting off our horses we walked up under cover to within a hundred yards,
when Robertson took his shot, and the ibex came crashing down, the most
fearful fall, the body bounding twenty feet at a time, knocking two of the
hounds who had been |98 half-way up head over
heels, and carrying them to the bottom of the cliff. The horns were not good,
thirty-four inches in length, but it was a curious trophy. It was a thing to
have seen, but of course not sport to an Englishman's mind.
The descent from our glacier showed how steep
the ground was we had ridden up; it was out of the question to ride down, and
without a stick you had to use your hands to steady yourself. Afzul put on
all the royal Chitrali airs at once, and had to be helped down, a man on each
side of him and his arms round their necks. An affected limpness came over
him, and he flopped down the hill like an animated rag doll, only to recover
when we got on to more rideable ground, where he was hoisted on his horse and
was at once himself again.
On my return to Mastuj I found awaiting me
Jemadar Rab Nawaz Khan, a native officer of good family in
I found that the Chitralis who had been to
Altogether I soon saw that my prospects of
satisfying everybody, or for the matter of that, anybody, |100 were remote. My difficulties would have been much
lightened in Chitral had Nizam and Afzul gone through, during their visit to
Between Mastuj and Chitral we found at Sanoghar,
Buni, and other places, miles of splendid cultivation, and we saw above us,
on the right bank of the river, the extensive fields of the Murikho valley.
But for the most part the road was, as before, extremely difficult; the last
couple of marches it was purposely left in the worst condition, running
through gorges and along cliffs on rickety brackets which could be destroyed
in a moment.
Glacial action is again well marked below
Mastuj, the road running over huge masses of rock, rounded, smoothed, and
polished by the ice, and showing the characteristic surface scratchings.
Many "darbands" or positions were
shown us, that, on the Parabek plain being the most curious. The road runs
across a huge fan once cultivated, |101 now
a desert owing to the failure of the stream which formed and watered the fan.
Suddenly you come to a great ravine with perpendicular walls sixty to a
hundred feet deep. The ravine runs without a break up into the mountains to
the right, and into the river to the left; there is only one path leading down
into it at its debouchure. Elsewhere one or two goat tracks exist, the heads
of which are covered by sungahs. These sungahs, planted apparently without
purpose in the open plain, are the first intimation you get of the existence
of this ravine. This was the second position forced by Colonel Kelly on his
march to the relief of Chitral, and it was carried by a turning movement to
his right in the hills. It is the only position in the open that I ever came
across in Chitral; it possessed great natural strength, but like all
positions taken up with only the idea of passive resistance, it was of course
doomed to fall to an enterprising enemy. An invading army from Badakshan had
been here checked and defeated.
Below Parabek was position after position, and
every day impressed me more with the difficulties of making war in this
country, and with the danger to which isolated bodies must be exposed. A
small body of troops moving in the valley could so easily, as our men found
to their cost when Chitral was |102 besieged in 1895, be headed by mountaineers using paths thousands of feet
above them, and would then find themselves in a trap with the road cut on
both sides of them, advance or retreat equally impossible.
Near Barnas there is a defile connected with one
of the proudest days in Chitrali history. In Shah Katur's day the Badakshani
ruler attacked him, and the invading army penetrated to Barnas. An envoy from
the Mehtar met the conquering general in the gorge, threw himself at his
feet, made complete submission on his master's part, and, clasping the
conqueror's knees, he implored mercy, then with a sudden jerk hurled him off
the road to plunge a hundred feet into the roaring torrent below. Both ends
of the defile were in a moment in Chitrali hands, and the whole invading
force, said to have numbered seven thousand men, was destroyed or taken
prisoner.
It was impossible not to be taken with the
Chitralis. Putting aside their avarice, which was but natural, and their
cruelty and treachery amongst themselves, their nobles were pleasant men to
meet, fond of sport, courteous and hospitable, and with a great love of their
wild country. The people----that is, the freemen, not the slaves----were
bright, cheery, impervious to fatigue, splendid mountaineers, fond of |103 laughter and song, devoted to polo and dancing. The man
striding along before your horse, with his loins girt, and the front end of
his choga tucked into his waistband to give his legs free play, his chest
open, and his shoulders thrown back by a sword carried across his back hooked
into his elbows, would sing all the way uphill and down dale, and would
gather the wild flowers as he passed them, and stick them into his turban. As
a race they are slight and wiry; there were only half a dozen tall men in the
country, and I never saw a fat one. This is no doubt partly due to the fact
that there is no superabundance of food available, but the result is good.
The children were really a joy to see; they had bright rosy cheeks and
well-shaped faces; and the small girls, who were not kept within doors, were
in many cases extremely pretty.
As we neared Chitral we were met by an
increasing number of grandees, of regularly increasing rank. Eight miles from
Chitral itself my old friend Raja Bahadur Khan, the Mehtar's half-brother,
received me. I never understood how he had acquired a Hindu title, but in the
Hindu-Kush they are not very particular. Half a mile further on, after
passing through the narrowest part of a gorge along a path a foot wide,
pegged on to the rock----one of the few |104 places not even a Chitrali would ride over----a mass of armed men met us. One
of them presented me from the Mehtar with a horse most gorgeously caparisoned
with gold embossed head-stall, high demi-pique saddle ----instrument of
torture for an Englishman accustomed to the familiar Whippy----and prettily
embroidered and spangled body cloth. Another half mile and the river leaves
the gorge, and on the opposite side there is an isolated rocky mound, along
the top of which were ranged some two hundred men, who fired a wild feu de
joie as we passed. A mile or so further we emerged into the plain, and
saw the Mehtar sitting surrounded by a brilliant crowd. Dismounting when
about one hundred and fifty yards from him, I walked forward, the Mehtar walking
to meet me half way. It was an interesting moment for both of us, as we shook
hands and looked into each other's eyes. The Mehtar was a big man, and heavy,
about sixty-five years of age, with a very strong and clever face, but the
mouth was spoilt by the loss of his front teeth.
After a few words of welcome we mounted, our
horses, and rode off. The Mehtar was surrounded by his court, Afzul-ul-Mulk
and various other sons were there, and representative nobles from all parts
of the country. The scene was one of the most |105 brilliant and striking it is possible to imagine. It
could not compare with the more ordered magnificence of the court of an
Indian prince, but what was lost in splendour and numbers was made up by its
wild picturesqueness. The Mehtar, dressed in green silk (he was a most devout
Mahomedan), riding a big horse covered with brilliant silver trappings, moved
off, with me on his right hand, the centre of a crowd of hundreds of horsemen
and footmen in the brightest array. Cloth of gold, the rich silks of Central
Asia, the most superb velvet coats, the colour almost hidden by the gold
embroidery, the brightest English and Chinese silks in all colours, scarlets
and blues, crimsons and purple, plain and brocaded, chogas of plain
whole-coloured velvets, or of English broadcloths, flaring cottons, and the
dull, brown haircloth of the country were all mingled without the semblance
of order in inextricable confusion. The only appearance of uniform was in the
Mehtar's corps de ballet, all the men and boys of which were dressed
alike in blue sleeveless coats over white muslin shirts covered with huge red
spots, finished off with bright red trousers, a costume at once startling and
effective.
We rode in this way three miles to the bridge,
which we dismounted to cross, then on past the fort, which Robertson was a
few years later to know so |106 well, and to assist in defending so splendidly, to the polo ground There the
usual performance was gone through, but on a greater scale than I had seen
before, with many more riders and more brilliantly arrayed. Then we rode back
to my camp, which was in an orchard a few hundred yards from the fort, I
having had quite enough of riding hand-in-hand with my host, a custom which,
however honourable, involves you in difficulties when you have to ride over
small stone walls, narrow water-courses, and in and out of deep ravines. The
Mehtar took his leave after a few minutes' conversation, and soon after sent
us in a most excellent dinner cooked by the ladies of his household. In the
couple of hours I had been with him he had made a deep impression on me. He
was a fine old man, a striking figure as he rode along, sitting his horse
upright and well; and had the history of his forty years of rule been
unknown, there was that in him which attracted your attention at once. I felt
instinctively that I was face to face with a ruler of men. |107
CHAPTER
III
A
MONTH IN CHITRAL
MEHTAR AMAN-UL-MULK was a very remarkable man.
For forty years his had been the chief personality on the frontier; even in
his father's time he had made his mark. It would be wearisome to attempt to
unravel the long story of battle and murder, treachery and intrigue, formed
by his life. Suffice it to say that he ruled a united Chitral, extending from
the borders of Punyal on one hand, to the borders of Kafiristan and Dir on
the other, and that the watershed of the Hindu-Kush was his northern
boundary. He was tributary to
A brief account of this incident will give a
good idea of the Mehtar's methods. Yasin was ruled by the Kushwakt family,
descended from Shah Kushwakt, the brother of Shah Katúr, the founder of the |108 Chitral royal family. The families of course frequently
intermarried, and were closely connected. In the year 1880, Pahlwán Bahadur,
the Kushwakt ruler of Yasin, and a nephew of Aman-ul-Mulk, who had had an
adventurous and stormy career, took it into his head to invade Punyal and to
expel the Dogras from Gilgit. The Mehtar encouraged him in every way,
promised him assistance, and urged him to the enterprise. Pahlwán started and
laid siege to Cherkilla, the chief fort of Punyal. The moment he was well
committed to his adventure the Mehtar, who had secretly collected his forces,
occupied Yasin. The unfortunate Pahlwán was at once deserted by his people,
and threw himself on his uncle's mercy. It was of the usual kind, and he died
suddenly.
The Mehtar was steeped to the lips in treachery;
his hands were crimson with the blood of his nearest relations; two out of
his three brothers he had murdered; the third was in exile in
The Mehtar ruled his country with a rod of iron,
and none dared gainsay his commands. But his rule was not popular----far from
it. His oppression extended in all directions: he sold large quantities of
timber yearly to Peshawari merchants, and the whole of it was cut and conveyed
to the streams by forced labour----of course unpaid for; he interfered in
trade, and levied prohibitive taxes on merchandise passing through his
country; he bought the goods of passing merchants, if he wanted them, at his
own valuation; he sold his subjects into slavery, and sent presents of slave
boys and girls to the Amir and to neighbouring chiefs. At the same time he
had many good points. He was deeply religious according to his lights, yet he
was no bigot. His view was that so long as a man was a good subject the ruler
had no call to interfere with his religious opinions, and while I was |110 in Chitral he soundly rated his son Murid for trying to
enforce orthodoxy among his people. He was a kind and indulgent father, and
devoted to his small sons, who used to form a pretty group round him when he
came to see me, clustering about him with the fearlessness of affection. In a
country where unnatural vices were rampant he was unstained. He had a
religious horror of them, and attributed his success over the Kushwakt chiefs
to their depravity, against which God's wrath had kindled. He was much
married, not "cursedly confined" to one wife, or for the matter of
that, to some dozens of wives and concubines. Like David, he "scattered
his Maker's image through the land," and at every village you found a
small son or heard of a daughter. He had eighty children.
His bearing was royal, his courtesy simple and
perfect, he had naturally the "courtly Spanish grace" of a great
hereditary noble, the dignity and ease of manner which is the birthright of
every gentleman in the East, but which were none the less striking from the
fact that the Mehtar had never left his mountain fastnesses. I had read
several descriptions of the Mehtar; my lamented friend, Ney Elias, had put
him down as in his second childhood, still full of cunning and intrigue, but
unable to follow an idea |111 or
to keep the thread of a conversation, and had warned me that I should find
him hopeless to do business with. I believe that the cause of this judgment
was that Ney Elias had seen the Mehtar during the fast month, which was
naturally very trying for an old man. Moreover, when passing through Chitral,
Ney Elias had no official position, and the Mehtar may have thought there was
nothing to gain by being attentive to his conversation. Anyone more
thoroughly competent to conduct affairs I never met.
I saw a great deal of him; he used to drop into
my camp after his morning's hawking expedition, or come in before his
afternoon's ride, always waiting at the entrance of my camp to be invited in,
for, by the etiquette of the country, the ground I occupied was my own. I
used to have to keep a sharp look-out not to be caught en déshabillé, for
I always met him at the entrance of the camp, and conducted him to my tent.
He used to sit for hours discussing everything under the sun, drinking tea,
and eating gingerbread nuts soaked in it,
The moment was an interesting one to be in
Chitral; Mahomed Ishak had invaded Afghanistan from Russian Turkestan, Afghan
Turkestan had fallen into his hands, the old princes of Wakhan, who had taken
refuge in Chitral territory from the Amir, had been summoned by him, and
momentarily reinstated in their country, his emissaries were passing through
Chitral, and going to Dir, Bajaur, and Swat, endeavouring to raise trouble
for the Amir. The Mehtar was very anxious; he was between the devil and the
deep sea; he feared the Amir, and rightly, and hated him with a bitter and
deadly hatred; he was afraid of the consequences if he espoused Mahomed
Ishak's cause, for the success of which he prayed incessantly, and the latter
failed in his attempt. On the other hand, Mahomed Ishak made great promises,
and, if successful, might be a good friend; he could scarcely be a more
dangerous and unpleasant enemy than Abdur Rahman. Altogether, it was a very
difficult question, and he came and discussed it with me. I advised him, in
what were the interests of Government as well as his own, not to stir up
strife: a war once |113 kindled on the
frontier spreads frequently in unexpected directions. I pointed out that the
Amir was our ally, that we did not desert our allies, and that Government
would not be best pleased if the Mehtar started a conflagration. In the end,
whether my counsel had anything to do with it or not, the old gentleman
decided to sit on the fence and do nothing. The Mehtar's views on the
condition of frontier affairs were interesting, and his knowledge of men and
matters varied and wide. A man does not rule a frontier state forty years for
nothing. He saw that, so far as his dynasty and country were concerned, safety
lay in alliance with us, danger in any closer intercourse with
My state visit to the Mehtar was most
ceremonious. A deputation of his courtiers came and escorted us to the fort,
at the gate of which the Mehtar met us, and conducted us to a dais outside,
under some magnificent chenar trees. It was a very picturesque sight: row
after row of the Mehtar's sons and courtiers in the most brilliant dresses
sat on each side of us on the ground, in the shade of the trees. The usual
band, composed of half a dozen kettle-drums played with sticks, double-headed
drums played with the hand, and pipes, struck up, and the corps de ballet of
men and boys, in their smart new uniform, dashed into the space in front of
the daïs and began dancing. The dances, as a rule, are much the same as the
Indian nautch, but a trifle quicker and more varied. There are,
however, some very quick and lively dances full of energy, where the men dash
round with flying steps, and one or two rather good sword dances, which are
worth seeing. |115
The Chitralis will dance, and look on at
dancing, all night long; they are passionately fond of it; the only thing
which they will stop it for is to hear their boys sing. The songs are the
usual love songs with occasional songs of war. I never picked up enough of
the language to understand them, but some of the airs were charming, and
deserve to be collected. I was always thankful when the boys came on instead
of the dancers. The boys' voices are really beautiful, and one would
willingly have called for them oftener had it been possible to do so without
giving the enemy cause to blaspheme. They had a pleasant way sometimes at
night, as you sat round a camp fire smoking, of bringing a boy, and starting
him singing in the darkness behind you. Very pretty plaintive melodies they
sang, accompanied by a few notes of the pipe.
The chorus at the Mehtar's durbar was composed
of all his men off duty, men from all the neighbouring villages who had come
to see the fun, a stray Kafir or two who grinned in a friendly way at us, all
the heterogeneous rabble possible to collect in Chitral. The price they paid
for being present and looking at the dancing was continued applause, shouts
of encouragement to the dancers, in which they were led by an official who
was described as |116 the head of the
Mehtar's household. He was a very wild-looking creature, who rushed along the
ranks of the spectators dressed in a scarlet cloth choga, and armed with a
big ornamented stick, with which he belaboured any of the crowd who did not
shout loud enough. After we had sat through the performance for some time the
Mehtar rose, and, taking me by the hand, escorted me along a narrow path made
by laying down cotton cloth, white and coloured, and stuffs of various kinds,
finishing in a strip of sham kinkob, all of which became the perquisite of my
servants after I had passed over it. The path led along the faces of the fort
to the private garden, from which there was a door leading to the household
offices and ladies' apartments. In the garden we found a tent pitched, into
which we entered, followed by three or four of the Mehtar's most important
sons and nobles.
Directly we had sat down the Mehtar began an
oration which lasted an hour, with interruptions to drink iced water, and to
rub snuff on his gums, the Chitrali way of taking this most seductive form of
the weed. The upshot of his discourse was that he was a faithful servant of
the British Government, and that he wanted various things, mostly |117 rifles and money. Some of his remarks were amusing, as
when looking a Kashmiri officer full in the face he said that he had been in
the habit, in the old days, of beating the Kashmiris and looting them, but
that out of consideration for us he had abandoned this source of revenue. All
this time I was getting horribly hungry; we generally breakfasted about
eleven, and had been fetched away from camp just before our breakfast was
ready, and it was long past two before the Mehtar showed signs of having
talked himself out. There was nothing for me to say beyond the usual
diplomatic banalités about the assurances I had received from the
Viceroy's and the Foreign Secretary's lips of the interest felt by the
Government in the welfare of Chitral, and of their personal regard for the
renowned chief who ruled its destinies. The whole thing was a sort of
full-dress debate, the object of which, on the Mehtar's part, was to let it
be known throughout Chitral, and in the adjacent Pathan countries, Asmar,
Dir, and Bajour, that he was definitely putting himself on the side of the
British Government, and under its powerful protection.
The Mehtar, having thoroughly talked himself
out, departed, leaving Afzul-ul-Mulk to do host. The |118 dinner was excellent of its kind, and we were introduced
to various famous royal dishes, about the best being large flat unleavened
cakes of bread full of minced meat, and sweet omelets made with honey.
I remained some time in Chitral, seeing the
Mehtar, formally or informally, every day, and talking to his leading men and
advisers whom he sent to see me very frequently. To obtain any influence or
information in the East an Englishman must always remember that to an Eastern
time is no object, and he must be prepared apparently to waste endless hours
in desultory conversation. The time so spent is not really wasted; something
can be learnt every day, and confidence is engendered by frequent
intercourse. Accessibility is a duty on the part of a frontier officer, and I
always made it a point during my time on the border to put aside any work to
receive a visitor. Talking to a live man is of more value to yourself, and
generally, in the end, of more service to Government, than writing or reading
reports.
The result of my conversations with the Mehtar
and his leading men was to leave in my mind a very poor opinion of the
military qualities of the Chitralis. They had an inordinate idea of their
power, but they had never been properly shot at. There was no |119 tradition of severe fighting amongst the people. The
nature of the country favoured wars of positions, and I found that once a position
was turned, and a few men shot, it was a recognised rule of the game that the
defenders should bolt. The rule appears to have been strictly adhered to, and
I never heard of an action in which more than ten or fifteen men were killed.
The people are naturally hopelessly laissez aller, and organisation is
unknown amongst them. The Adamzadas, I find noted in my diary, might possibly
fight, but the common people most probably would only do so in a half-hearted
way; at the same time, their rapidity in movement, and intimate knowledge of
their country, and its capabilities for defence, would make them dangerous
enemies to a small invading force, and valuable auxiliaries while on the
winning side.
Events proved the justness of the opinion then
formed and recorded. A few years later saw Chitral in the throes of civil
war, and a Mehtar in possession one day, ousted and flying the next, after
the fall of a position attended with the loss of one man. The feeble
resistance made to Colonel Kelly's advance by the Chitralis, though holding
splendidly defensible positions, the secondary part played by the Chitralis
in the memorable siege of Chitral, when all the real |120 fighting was done by Umra Khan's Pathans, and the skill
they showed in cutting off small parties of Sikhs, all went to prove that,
though not wanting in courage and endurance, they lack the tenacity and grit
which is wanted to enable men to face severe loss and to make real soldiers.
As Napoleon says, "Un homme ce n'est pas un soldat." The
Chitrali is wanting in the something which makes a soldier.
I found that the Mehtar had no conception of our
real strength, no standard by which to judge our power. He undervalued our
troops, his only idea of a standing army being taken from the old
Before leaving Chitral I sent the Mehtar the |121 presents I had brought up for him. The local etiquette
forbade the gifts being offered in public, as everything so received had at
once to be given away. My presents, therefore, were taken to the Mehtar by my
head orderly. They consisted of a double-barrel express rifle, a pair of shot
guns, and a miscellaneous assortment comprising silver goblets, cutlery, gold
cloth from Benares, silks and broadcloths; and as the ladies were to be
propitiated, carefully-graduated collections of rich brocades, silks,
embroidered muslins, looking-glasses, jewelled trinkets, and last, but not
least, boxes of scented soap and cases of perfumery. I was careful to
ascertain the proper proportion to be observed in graduating the presents for
the Mehtar's leading wives, and had a solemn interview with his minister on
the subject. The result was excellent, and to my surprise and satisfaction I
found that the Mehtar was delighted with the presents, and valued them at
considerably more than treble what they had cost in
From Chitral I sent letters to
I had a final interview with the Mehtar before
leaving Chitral, and he presented me at parting with the usual number of
horses, and with some fur coats, one qf which was much admired when I wore it
in camp, the outside being composed of Bokhara silk in broad bands of red and
gold. Our first halt was at Shoghot, a point at which all the roads leading
over the passes mentioned above converge. We passed over the Chitrali
racecourse on the way, a stretch nearly four miles long of flat ground which,
once cultivated, has been ruined by floods, and is one mass of sand and
stones. At the far end of the plain is a raised mound, the Mehtar's grand
stand, and the course was the full distance. How any horse could survive
being raced four miles over the stones is difficult to understand, but they
did. Afzul-ul-Mulk amused me by saying he had a horse which was undefeated
over this course, and that he much regretted he had not taken him to Calcutta
and entered him at the races there, as he certainly would have won the
Viceroy's Cup, the Derby of India. After passing over this open ground, the
road runs through a limestone gorge, with absolutely perpendicular sides. |124
As it was now autumn, and the rivers had shrunk,
we marched as a rule up the bed of the stream, which was crystal clear and
full of fish, fording a dozen times a day with the water to our saddle-flaps.
The trees were just turning, and every valley you looked up was ablaze with
"the flying gold of the ruined woodland." We passed many wild-duck
decoys, at constructing which the Chitralis seem very clever. They run off a
portion of the stream on to a flat field, making a pool twenty yards or so
square, at one corner of which, the water runs in. Here they make a wicker
cage with a wide mouth and tunnel gradually tapering up-stream. They stick
decoy ducks about the open water, and when the wild duck settle, drive them
into the tunnel, catching sometimes two and three hundred at a time. The
bridges speak for the lightness of foot of the people; they are merely, as a
rule, light hurdles of willow; our heavy-footed English labouring folk would
crash through them, but they seem strong enough for the people who use them.
Horses of course ford.
We reached the top of the Dorah, fourteen
thousand eight hundred feet in height, without difficulty, riding practically
to the top of the pass. We had a lovely day, the air was perfect, and the |125 view from the top is fine. Immediately below you the
ground drops very suddenly to the Hauz-i-Dorah,
One last look out over the forbidden land
through which our feet might not stray, and we turned away |126 and set our faces for India, feeling happy that we had
come so far and seen so much, sad to think that the limits of our wanderings
had been reached, and that each day now brought us nearer the dull routine of
civilisation, from which six hundred miles now separated us. There is a
fascination which no description can convey to those who have not experienced
it in the nomad's life.
We had passed a Kafir village on our way up the
Dorah, the people outlaws from Kafiristan owing to some blood feud, and had
been hospitably entreated to stay and dine. This, as we were doing a double
march to the top of the pass and back, we were forced to decline, but our
would-be hosts turned up in our camp in the evening, and brought us a huge
cream cheese, weighing about a stone, excellent to eat when you ignored the
dirt of their methods. One boy was very handsome, with an aquiline nose and
finely cut mouth, and really beautifully-shaped head and face, but the
majority were uninteresting looking. We parted on the best of terms, as I
gave each man and boy a looking-glass, knife, scissors, needle and thread, a
priceless collection for them. We passed some wonderful hot sulphur springs
at Shah Salim, a few miles below the head of the pass, and one of the curious
circles of stones before mentioned, which |127 are
attributed by the people of the country to the Kafirs.
The Lutkú valley, through which our road ran, is
famous in Chitral, and rightly so, for its cultivation, and we were more
struck by its wealth on our return than on our march up. Riding up you often
see nothing but a series of walls, the retaining walls of the fields; coming
downhill the whole of the cultivation is spread before you. Every inch of the
ground is utilised, the soil being cleared wherever possible, the stones
taken off it and piled in huge heaps, and every large rock which is too big
to move has stones stacked upon it. The fruit of the valley is renowned,
peaches, apples, pears, and splendid grapes abound; the grain crops could not
be finer, and every village is embowered in huge walnut trees, truly a land
flowing with milk and honey! It had its drawbacks for the native traveller.
We came across a kafila en route from Bajour to Badakshan, and found
one of the Hindu traders bewailing the loss of a fine mule killed by a fall
from a cliff, the second lost since they had left Chitral, and half the load
washed away in the stream. Several roads lead from the Lutkú valley to
Kafiristan up side valleys, and right and left of the points where the
valleys joined were well-known places of slaughter, where Kafirs might be |128 expected suddenly to dash out of the tamarisk thickets,
and swoop on any caravan not heavily guarded, or on any isolated man. Some of
these side valleys were very beautiful from the distance, particularly one
leading by the Shui pass into Kafiristan. We had gone to visit some more hot
springs which came out some hundred feet or so above the road, and the view
up the side valley was lovely, a sea of autumn colour in which the gold of
the willow shaded off into the dark red of the rose thickets.
On our way down we branched off to try and get
some shooting. We got none, but were amply repaid by the magnificent scenery.
We camped one night at an altitude of about twelve thousand feet on a
hillside so steep that our small tent could only be pitched by raising one
pole on a pile of stones, and our bed places had to be similarly built up. We
here got an insight into the reckless way the Chitralis destroy their timber.
Some of our hosts! followers were belated, and in order to attract their
attention, the men with us calmly fired a patch of forest. The next morning
we rode up and crossed the shoulder of the range we were on at a height of
sixteen thousand feet. I was pretty well accustomed by then to riding over
anything, but we crossed ground that day that a few months before I should |129 have considered impossible for a horse----long, sloping
stretches of shaley rock across which our horses picked their way in the most
extraordinary manner. The view from the top was grand: right opposite us,
with only one range of lower mountains in between, rose Tirich Mir,
twenty-five thousand feet high; no cloud obscured the view, and so close did
we seem that every turn of the glaciers could be traced, and the lines of the
avalanches distinctly seen.
The Mehtar came out to see me at Shoghot, and we
spent another day together. With him was his son-in-law Rahat Mian, a
Kaka-Kheyl timber merchant from within our borders, and at the moment the
most important man in Chitral, as the Mehtar trusted almost implicitly in his
advice. Our Native Agent in Chitral also came, and had a long talk to me in
the morning, during which he inveighed against Rahat Mian, and unfolded his
many villainies. Rahat Mian was a study, an old man with a very shrewd face,
and an expression entirely under control. He used to sit during my long talks
with the Mehtar with a pomegranate in his hand, cutting out all sorts of
fantastic geometrical patterns in the rind with a sharp penknife, watching
everybody out of the corner of his eye and never losing a word. He produced a
letter from Mahomed Ishak, which he said the Mehtar had |130 intercepted, and our Agent praised his loyalty and
devotion to Government, and begged that I would bring his services to notice,
he having told me all about the letter an hour before, and how copies had
been sent post haste weeks ago to their destination. It was interesting to
watch the two who hated each other with a deadly hatred, each knowing the
other was lying, and both profuse in their compliments and expressions of
affection.
Diplomacy in the Hindu-Kush is an interesting
game to watch; the men intrigue from their cradle; it is an amusement as well
as the business of life. For an Englishman the only safe course is the honest
one; he must think pretty carefully before he speaks, and then speak plainly.
Every word must prove true, every promise must be fulfilled to the letter;
following on these lines a man in the end will get the influence he wants. At
first the native diplomatist will not believe him, and will search for hidden
meanings, but in the end he will have confidence in this strange being who
plays the game on such hitherto unheard-of lines. But the Englishman who
believes anything which is told him will get into difficulties. You must
learn to disbelieve any story told you, however plausible, unless you have
proof positive from other sources of its accuracy; your first thought |131 when any statement is made must always be what is the
speaker's motive, especially if he has told you the truth. No man ever
approaches the object he aims at directly. By roundabout and devious paths he
will lead up to his point, which is perhaps only brought out casually at the
end of a long interview. You live in an atmosphere of falsehood and deceit,
the men you do business with lying freely and unblushingly on every available
occasion; but they bear you no ill-will when you expose their little lapses,
and at once set to work to weave some new plot. The Mehtar was a past master
in the art, and it was a never-failing source of excitement and interest to
have deailings with him. We got to know each other fairly well by the end of
the next four years.
In the afternoon of the last day we spent
together we went off to look on at polo. The game was dull, for the players
were indifferent, and the ground, at each end of which cropped up huge rocks,
was half under water. But the show was diversified by the Mehtar producing
various rifles, and making some very fine shooting at a mark across the polo
ground, firing over the heads of the players. Then followed the usual dances,
one a sword dance to the music of the royal band, the drummer in which, who
had only |132 one tooth in his upper jaw, fascinated Robertson and me
by his excitement and animation, throwing his arms about frantically, his
whole face lighting up, and his eyebrows working furiously in time to the
dancing. After the Chitralis had danced, some Bajouri Pathans present gave us
an exhibition, the most picturesque piece of dancing we had seen. Five men,
dressed in the loose flowing blue Pathan shirt, formed a circle round a
flower thrown on to the ground, and danced round it, alternately advancing
and retiring, swaying their bodies forward till their heads nearly touched in
the centre of the ring, then throwing up their arms and swinging back their
bodies and dancing away, their clothes flying and giving a wonderful grace
and go to the dance. They then gave us another dance, also in most perfect
time, to a plaintive song which they sung, their faces indicative of the
deepest grief. This was followed by a wild repetition of the first dance,
much faster, and with more dashing action, the accompaniment on the part of
their friends being the rapid discharge of their guns. The flower in the centre
represented a lovely maiden, and the dance tells the tale of a love story
ending in an elopement.
Next morning the Mehtar paid me what was really
his final visit, presented me with a last horse, |133 badly galled, and recapitulated all his wants and views.
We parted after an exchange of many civil speeches, and promises of eternal
friendship, with genuine regret on my side, for I had got to like the old man
very much, and to admire his strength of character and undoubted powers. We
returned to Mastuj by the right bank of the river, making a detour through
some of the higher valleys. The road the first day was very bad in parts; one
awful cliff, across which it seemed to run for miles, gave but just room for
a horse to move along its face. We crossed a succession of great bowl-shaped
bays in the hills, several miles across from side to side, cut up by deep
ravines, the whole bed of the saucer one mass of cultivation wherever water
could be brought to bear. The outlet for the streams which drain these bays
into the main river below is generally through a narrow gorge hundreds of
feet deep, with walls so precipitous and fall so rapid that no regularly made
path can be taken along it. The Chitralis averred that no man had ever
succeeded in getting through one particular gorge.
We struck a vein of folk-lore which I should
have loved to explore, but I had no time to work it properly, and for really
satisfactory results the enquirer must talk the language of the country,
which I could |134 not. We were sitting one night after dinner by our camp
fire, looking across the valley at the dim form of Tirich Mir, rising ghostly
and white in the pale moonlight, when one of our hosts casually mentioned the
existence of a lake at the foot of the great mountain by the side of which
are the flat stones on which the fairies wash their cloths. Readers need
hardly be reminded of the Continental and Eastern habit of beating linen on a
flat stone. You could also, he said, find their rice-pounding stones there in
great numbers; these must be the round pot holes found in the rocks of all
glacier streams, but what the washing-boards were I could not make out, and
the lake was unfortunately miles away, so that time could not be spared to
explore.
The conversation so begun gave rise to much talk
about the fairies. We were told that they were heard to sing or wail round
the towers of Shoghot Fort ten or twelve days before one of the ruling family
died, and this led to the information that the present Mehtar's
great-grandfather had married a fairy, having been a master of the lore which
gives command over them. The king and his fairy bride lived on for years as
husband and wife without any one knowing it, as he was in the habit of going
to Gairat, a village seven miles |135 below Chitral, where the fairies from Tirich Mir assemble every Friday night
to say their prayers, and meeting her there. This place is still used by the
fairies for their devotions, which take place at a spot marked by a large
flat stone. No one will go shikaring there alone, and my informant, who was
once belated, and had to spend the night dose to the spot with a single
companion, heard the ghostly call to prayer, and the air full of the voices
of a great multitude talking Chitrali. The union of the old king with the fairy
was blessed with one daughter, and she, though a very old woman now, has
continued to take an interest in the fortunes of the royal family, and warns
them of the approaching death of any member by the sounds heard at Shoghot.
Many men had seen her, notably a man still living at Owir, with whom we were
promised an interview which unluckily did not come off.
Those who have seen the fairies, and a couple of
years before a large number of them were seen by many of the inhabitants of
the valley, flying through the air to Tirich Mir, some on horseback and some
on foot, describe them as exactly like and women, but very beautiful, and
dressed mostly in white. Their only peculiarity seems to |136 be that they have no knee or ankle joints, and that the
toes of their feet point to the rear, the heel being to the front. This by
the way must be inconvenient when riding. They occasionally carry off men for
ten days or so, and treat them well. The man at Owir, who was carried off,
lived with them for ten days, and saw the old king's fairy daughter. He
reports having seen very large numbers of fairies, and that he was pressed to
marry by them, but on his refusing was returned to his home. They appear
never to do any one good, and to distribute their thievish tricks and the
harm they do indiscriminately among the righteous and the evil-doers.
Asked what the fairies subsisted on, our
informant explained that if any man lied about the amount he had harvested,
and told his neighbour that he had only ten sacks of grain when he really had
garnered twenty, the fairies took the balance, and left him with what he
professed to have harvested. He had never heard of their doing any harm to
cows, but said they undoubtedly rode the horses at night, and that if a man
had done his horse's mane up nicely, he was likely to find him in the morning
completely tired out, and with the mane tangled, knotted, or plaited. I could
not quite make out which, or whether the knotting |137 the mane corresponded with our "witches'
stirrups." He also told us of a man living at a village above Chitral
who had gone out shooting, and shot at and wounded an ibex, which escaped. A
few days after a man of the village, who is lame to this day, came up and
asked why he had shot him, and on the sportsman denying it, and saying he had
only shot at an ibex, the lame man, who is known to be an expert in fairy
lore, said, "I was the ibex."
We then unfortunately asked about their
religion, and here got away from folk-lore proper to the made-up stories of
the wizard, for we were told that those skilled in fairy art said the fairies
were of all religions, Mahomedans who worship at Gairat, and who have Mullahs
like terrestrial Mahomedans, Hindoos, and others. What the latter worshipped
we could not discover. The fairies, we learnt, are at great enmity with the
demons, whom they very much fear.
The principal harm they do is to deprive people
of their senses and to carry them off. They occasionally make themselves
obnoxious by infesting a village. Lately a fairy had taken possession of one,
and had wounded several people by throwing stones at them. No one was killed,
but the fairy |138 made it especially unpleasant for any one opening any
closed box in a house, and finally the nuisance became so great that the
Mehtar was appealed to. He called in the help of a wise man who exorcised the
fairy, and no further harm was done.
The whole of the above was got from our
informant without asking a single leading question, except that I asked him
if ever the fairies rode people's horses, but his answer was so ready and
detailed that it could hardly have been made up at the moment. Everything he
told us was said with an air of conviction, and as if talking of an everyday
matter: it was a most delightful experience, and I only wished I could take
down the conversation in shorthand, for much of the detail must have been
lost. Belief in fairies is universal in the Hindu-Kush, and, for the matter
of that, in one form or another throughout the East.
A travelled and well-educated Kashmiri with us
was with the greatest difficulty repressed during our talk; he was always
wanting to break in with some Kashmiri variation, civilised and thereby
ruined, of these local tales. The next day took us to Owir, where we camped
at a height of ten thousand feet, having ridden up five thousand feet, and
crossed at sixteen thousand a razor-back pass |139 between the two valleys. It was beginning to be very
cold, and we enjoyed making the descent on foot, plunging straight down the
shaley slopes.
The sandstone strata at the top of the valley
seemed full of fossils. I picked up a couple of large ones, some convoluted
shell, but, unfortunately, my orderlies did not understand that I attached
any importance to them, and they were lost There is but one drawback to a
march such as we were making, and that is the time limit. You pass many
things of interest which you cannot visit; you are constantly tantalised by a
half glimpse of some beauty or curiosity which you pass with a sigh, knowing
that you will never have the chance of seeing it again. I longed to stop and
dig, and to hunt for fossils here, as I had longed to explore the Buddhist
topes on the road, or to spend days trying to get at the folk-lore, but the
fates drove as on. We tried to find our fairy-visiting friend in one of the
Owir hamlets, but failed, I forget why.
Next day we crossed into another valley, and
halted for breakfast "at a place called Barun, the residence of a
headman whose ancestors had been kings of this collection of valleys. He was
a rich man, the possessor of over three hundred slaves. All the four valleys
of the Owir district are |140 of
the same type, and are remarkable for the outcrop of saltpetre, which reduces
the soil available for cultivation. The Owir stream is formed by the junction
of the waters from the four valleys, and runs out finally into the Chitral
river, through the narrow gorge described above, up which no man can force
his way. The march beyond Barun was terribly severe, in and out of a
succession of steep ravines hundreds of feet deep, the last ascent of a
thousand feet, up which our horses barely carried us, landing us on the
watershed between the Owir and the Mastuj valley. The view back was
indescribably grand, we were told: unfortunately for us,
The Lun valley is a replica of the Owir; Turikho
and Murikho, the upper and lower kho, or valley, |141 are districts of some importance. The former, a valley
some fifty miles long and a mile wide, as a rule shut in by huge mountains,
the latter, shorter and more open, is a continuation of the former. The whole
district is most favoured, and abounds in fruit and flocks and herds. In
Murikho there are some of the only manufactures of the country, robes woven
from the wool of unborn lambs, and others in which the down of the wild duck
is intermixed. The latter are more curious than useful, and give the wearer a
most fluffy and half-fledged appearance. This sort of cloth is also made in
the upper portion of Hunza. From here come the celebrated falcons still
exported to
The method of catching is simple; a bird,
according to the Chitralis, must be full grown to be of any use, and caught
when ranging for food. The trapper makes a little stone box in which he sits,
a small hole being left in the roof on which a chicken tied by the leg moves
about, the string being in the man's hand below. After the hawk or falcon has
seized his victim, the string is gently pulled, and, thinking that it is
merely the chicken moving in his struggles to escape, the bird grips the
harder, and is pulled to the hole, when the man |142 below seizes it by the legs, and its liberty is over.
The Chitralis are wonderfully clever at breaking their birds----I have seen
one flown captured not fully a week----and trust for taming them to keeping
them awake. They keep the bird awake for about three nights, constantly
talking to it, and, finally, when it is tamed by want of sleep and hunger,
begin to feed it, and to use the lure. The large grey falcon they mostly use is
a lovely bird, and they are devoted to the sport.
The Mehtar used to go after chikor every day
almost, and we once got an excellent exposition of the sport in his company.
We rode up the valley a short way, and took our stand on the edge of a very
steep fan, beaters having gone a couple of miles further up the valley to
move chikor, the mountain partridge. In a few minutes we saw a covey coining
skimming along, following the contour of the hillside, as they always fly to
avoid the dangerous open, and going the pace driven partridges can go. The
Mehtar unhooded his falcon, and stood at the edge of the cliff, eagerly
watching the approaching birds; as they passed there was a quick move of the
wrist, and the grey death shot down like a passing shadow, and killed a
couple of hundred yards from us. This was repeated again and again, generally
with success, |143 but a falcon loosed a moment too late had no chance. I
had a beautiful falcon given me, and had some very good sport with it
sometimes, but my native friends coveted it so dreadfully, and begged for it
so persistently, that I finally had to give it away.
The winter was now coming on, though it was but
the beginning of October, and we had heavy falls of snow on the higher hills,
which made the weather perfect, but rather cold at night. The Chitralis began
to dress accordingly, and in addition to the ordinary brown woollen gown,
which all classes wear, we now saw bright cotton-wadded coats of flowered
green or pink.
Finally, dropping into the bed of the Turikho
river, we reached Drasan, Afzul-ul-Mulk's favourite residence, a fort of the
usual type, square, with high corner towers, and were given a right royal
reception. Nizam-ul-Mulk was very anxious for me to go and see him in
Turikho, but the passes out were under snow, and I could not afford to go
twice over the same ground very far, so I had, much to my regret, to decline.
This was rather unfortunate, as Afzul-ul-Mulk was thereby given another
opportunity of entertaining me, which delighted him very much, but made his
brother and his brother's retainers perfectly furious. It was very
disappointing for me also, as I |144 wanted to make friends with all equally, and, moreover, it prevented my
visiting the Baroghil, one of the most important passes over the Hindu-Kush.
But with snow falling every night marches over glaciers were not to be
lightly undertaken; even over some of the rocky marches the roads would have
been dangerous. There is nothing worse than floundering over rocks you cannot
see, hidden by a covering of new snow which gives no foothold to man or
beast.
So we marched into Mastuj again, and after a day
spent in sorting out our kit, we despatched our servants, heavy baggage, and
extra horses towards Gilgit by the road we had come, while we ourselves
started for another tour. We cut ourselves down to the strictest necessities,
one small tent, seven feet square, for the two of us, one for orderlies and
servants, no beds, tables, chairs, or unnecessary luxuries, for I meant to
double march steadily for a fortnight. Every follower was mounted, and we
managed to do all we wanted.
And here I would pay a tribute to our native
servants, the routine of whose work on the march would astonish servants at
home. They called us shortly after daybreak, and produced a welcome
cup of tea, water for washing was ready outside, and the moment we were up,
and at our chilly ablutions, the |145 tent
came down, our bedding was packed, and the ponies loaded and despatched. We
mounted shortly after, and rode for three or four hours, then halted for our
mid-day meal, which one of our men would cook and serve beautifully hot by
the side of the road. We probably stopped here for an hour or so to let the
baggage get well ahead, and our servants used to go on. Some time in the afternoon
we would get to camp to find tents up and tea ready. Dinner was usually
served at dark, and after that we turned in. It sounds easy and pleasant
enough, but let any one try marching twenty miles a day for a week over the
impossible roads we were using, most of. the way necessarily at a foot's
pace, with cooking, tent-pitching and striking, baggage-loading, etc., all
thrown in, and I think they would soon have enough of it. I saw, of course,
that the servants fared as well as we did; they got any amount of meat and
tea, and my orderlies helped in everything except the cooking, so that we got
on excellently. Some time afterwards I did, with the servant who was now with
me, two hundred miles at the rate of forty miles a day, with baggage and only
one set of baggage mules, the best going over mountains we ever put in, and
we had endless variations of level and two passes of over twelve thousand
feet to negotiate. I did admire his |146 pluck on this occasion. It was in the summer, and frightfully hot part of the
way, and, to avoid the heat as much as possible, we were up at two in the
morning. We were on the move twelve to fourteen hours, one day for nearly
twenty. I used to get a couple of hours' sleep at the mid-day halt, but do
not think my man had time for this, and yet he was always smiling and cheery,
and full of energy to the very end.
Our day's halt at Mastuj was no rest for me, for
I had to say good-bye to some of the Mehtar's sons who had come with me, to
write endless testimonials ---- the fiction as to the value of the
testimonial has penetrated even to the innermost recesses of the Hindu-Kush
---- to distribute largess with a discriminating hand on all sides, and to
write one or two official letters as well. Next morning we started for our
march up the valley of the Yarkhun river, taking the winter road ---- that is
to say, spending half the day fording an ice-cold stream as clear as crystal.
The Chitrali footmen shocked our Pathans very much by rolling up their
voluminous skirts, taking off their paijamas, and fording stark
naked. They are the only Mahomedans I have ever come across who go naked, but
not ashamed.
After seeing as much as was necessary of the |147 defiles through which the river runs, we retraced our
steps, and made for the Chamarkand pass. At the foot of this I met with a
bitter disappointment: my messenger who had gone to
Afzul-ul-Mulk came as far as the Chamarkand with
us, and took leave there, after an abortive attempt at another ibex hunt with
dogs. His country had been a pleasure to travel through, all the roads having
been repaired, and the rough places made smooth in his anxiety to please.
Pleasant as he had been, the more one saw of him the more the intriguing and
ruthless savage came out, and the more I distrusted him. Still, he was a courteous
host and a pleasant companion, and I was sorry to say good-bye to him.
It was far colder than when we had last been on |148 the Chamarkand; the snow in a light sprinkling was on
the pass, and covered the mountains in all directions down to twelve thousand
feet. Frost had taken a firm hold of ground and stream, and the banks of the
latter were hung with icicles. The road down ran through a broad open valley,
that carried one back to the moorland at home on an autumn day. Clouds hung
over the hills, dropping shifting curtains of snow and sleet, the distant
mountains stood out dark blue and purple with snow-covered tops, the nearer
showed grey dashed here and there with bright colouring from the grasses in
their autumn tints. The jungle in the stream bed had turned a dark red brown,
and among the snow-sprinkled tussocks of dead and dying grasses fed a great
herd of highland cattle. At least so they looked to me when I first caught
sight of them, and drew rein to inspect them closely. They were mostly black,
but many were there of smoky dun or mouse colour; some carried wide, sweeping
horns, others were like polled Angus, but all had the same characteristics;
they were very high in the withers, very short-legged, and they carried the
most splendid coats, with masses of hair on the shoulder and forearm. They
were all half-breds, crossed with the yak, as their bushy tails showed. The
colouring was exactly that of a mixed |149 herd
at home, but the shape was ungainly. Passing down lower we flushed a couple of
splendid specimens of the solitary snipe, which were soon added to the
larder.
There was not much new to be seen on our way
down after we had regained our old road above Ghizr; the only change was in
the colouring. The willow copses in the river bed were now a blaze of gold;
the orchards every colour from dark green to almost scarlet; the streams had
shrunk, and now, less violent, ran crystal clear, a beautiful ultramarine
colour, turning to opal in the deeper pools, and reflecting all the brilliant
colouring of the banks. The roads up to our Punyal border, through
Nizam-ul-Mulk's country, were vile, and compared ill with Afzul's. We reached
Gakuch again on the 15th October, and were met by our Punyali friends some
way out: it had been a very trying double march that day, and for once we
came to grief. Robertson's servant went down some small drop, horse and all,
and the horse promptly bolted. My servant remained to look after him, so that
when our kit came into camp, which it did pretty late, the most necessary
things for dinner were of course not forthcoming, and we turned in after
dining on dried grapes, the bread of the country, and tea. Many of the
marches were nightmares, and the record |150 in
my diary becomes monotonous with the detailed horrors of the road, but the
picture that night as we rode in would have repaid a good deal. The view,
when the moonlight conquered the dying day, was very lovely; snow covered all
the hills forming the valley, the broad, stony river bed, with its scattered
tamarisk jungle and broken threads of water, lay in a flood of soft light,
chequered by the dark shadows of the trees and cliffs, and the great
precipices of the hills immediately above us seemed to loom larger and
grander every moment. Not that it quite made up for tired horses blundering
in the deep shadow over the rocks, the uncertainty as to whether our things
would arrive in camp, and the certainty that we should have no dinner.
Next morning we lay peacefully in bed till ten,
read accumulated piles of letters and papers, and idled generally. No one who
has not marched for months at a time can fully appreciate the luxury of a
morning in bed.
In the afternoon we walked down to a great
tamarisk jungle in the river bed, and had a drive for a red bear. Many years in
Our horses enjoyed their unaccustomed halt to
the full, and spent the day lying down fast asleep, one of them snoring
persistently, and my favourite doubtless dreaming of war, for he lay neighing
quietly and gently moving his legs, like a dog growls and twitches in his
sleep. This was the horse Nizam had given me, as he was afraid of riding him
himself, and he carried me for five years, and only died, full of years and
honour, three years later. Every one knew the "Hubshi" at Gilgit
and on the frontier. He was the beau ideal of a horse for a mountainous
country, born in the Kirghiz steppes, a rich dark bay stallion, with perfect
black points, his coat meant by nature to withstand real cold, curled, when
not clipped, in tight astrakan-like curls on his legs, and in broad waves and
curls all over his body. From this peculiarity he |153 got the name of the "Hubshi," or negro, all
ponies carrying this coat being so called in
We varied the monotony of our march to Gilgit by
going down the left bank of the river as far as Cherkilla, the chief fort of
Punyal, where we turned up into the mountains, and had a couple of days of
abortive attempts at sport. There were some nasty places on the road, one
zigzag rising several hundred feet and unusually steep. Half-way up a leading
pony dislodged a rock, which came rattling down, and cut my pony's legs from
under him. For a moment I thought he was over the cliff, but he recovered
himself. |155
We got no sport here, but I got orders to return
to
Robertson left me near Astor, remaining to shoot
for ten days in one of the famous nullahs there. He was to bring on all our
baggage to
I took the road by the Burzil pass, fourteen
thousand feet in height, by which the road to Gilgit now runs, and examined
the route carefully. It is a short march longer than the road I had come by,
and there is not so much grass on the way for transport animals, but it
offered an easier alignment, was said to be open earlier in the summer, and
was accordingly selected. My diary is full of descriptions of glorious views
and colouring, but what struck me most after crossing the Burzil, and leaving
the gigantic mountain slopes of the Hindu-Kush behind, was how small the
scenery of the upper Gurais valley looked. It seemed |157 as I crossed and recrossed the now dwindled stream, and
passed under cliffs a couple of hundred feet high, above which stretched pine
forest and snow peaks, that I was wandering through the scenery of a doll's
house, so accustomed had the eye become to the huge proportions of the great
mountains I had left behind. The effect was always the same when I returned
from Gilgit, and it took fully a day before one's eye became accustomed to
the new proportions of the landscape.
Below Gurais there was a view which, as the sun
was only touching a couple of small patches of golden hillside high up in the
background, and the rest of the landscape was in the evening shadow, would
have made a theme for another "Chill October." In the foreground
lay a flat piece of meadow land, the brightness all gone out of the green,
framed on each side by copses of leafless willow, through which the stream in
a dozen small branches ran cold and clear over a broad bed of grey shingle.
To the right great bare grass slopes led up to precipices of granite; to the
left a sombre pine forest came down into the plain. In the middle distance a
dense wood stretched across the valley, a study in all shades of grey. The
lower parts of
A couple of days more carried me to Srinagar,
then empty of court and visitors, all having gone to India for the winter,
and so, after crossing the Woollar Lake, once more resonant with the musical
cry of thousands of wild geese and ducks, and passing through the most
magnificent autumn colouring down the Jhelum valley, I reported myself early
in November 1888 to my brother at Lahore, where he was with the Viceroy.
So ended my first expedition to the Hindu-Kush.
I had marched about twelve hundred miles, visited much interesting country,
made the acquaintance of |159 many
interesting men, and had been able to study on the spot questions which were
soon to rise to importance.
As I passed Gilgit I heard that a Russian
officer had just been in Hunza. The game had begun. |160
CHAPTER
IV
ESTABLISHMENT
OF THE GILGIT AGENCY
I ARRIVED at
The Native States, following the traditions of
their forefathers, kept up at the time of which I speak large and entirely
useless armies, which could be nothing but a source of danger in time of
trouble; |161 ill-paid, ill-armed, undisciplined, they existed in tens
of thousands; no source of strength but a great source of expense to the
States which kept them up, and a menace to the internal peace of the country
should the armies of the Paramount Power be engaged beyond the frontier. It
had been felt for many years that these huge masses of armed men were a
danger to the State, and that the danger must be grappled with. The plan
adopted involved the reduction of large numbers of the armed rabble in all
Native States, and the substitution in their place of small compact bodies,
of well-trained, disciplined, and regularly paid troops, whose training
should be under the supervision of our own inspecting officers, while the
command should be left in the hands, of the gentlemen and nobles of the
States. The men were no longer to be, as was often the case heretofore,
mercenaries from
The scheme was received with opposition; men of
the old school at home and in India croaked and prophesied evil things, but
one thing or the other had to be done; either Government must insist on the
disbandment of the overgrown armies of Native States, thereby showing its
distrust of rulers and |162 people, or it must trust in their loyalty, reorganise their armies, and put
them in possession of a force which should be of real use, and which should
be worthy to find a place in line with our own troops. Fortunately for the
Empire there was a statesman at the helm in
It was a great scheme, giving to fighting races,
and to their hereditary leaders, a chance of wearing the sword, of resuming
the honourable profession of arms, the only one for many races and castes in
which a man of good blood can engage. How splendidly the plan has worked but
few realise. The Imperial Service Troops now represent a force of some twenty
thousand men, not all of course of equal value, but still the pick of the
population of the Native States. The Rajput is there, the Sikh of the Manjha,
the Mahratta, the sturdy Dogra, the Mahomedan born to war, and no one who has
seen |163 the Rahtor chivalry sweep by in its pride at Jodhpur,
led by the Maharaja himself, and commanded by men like Sir Pertab Singh, no
one who has seen the cavalry, infantry, and transport trains of other States
in peace and in war, can fail to realise the value of the great addition to
the armed strength of the Empire created by this movement.
After a few days at Lahore the Viceroy left, and
we scattered in all directions, my brother to Sikkim to negotiate with a
Chinese Amban, I to write my report on the state of things at Gilgit, and to
discuss various questions with the new Resident in Kashmir, Colonel
Parry-Nisbet, and with Mr. Merk, the well-known authority on the Peshawar
frontier. Having finished my report, and got all the information I wanted, I
went down in January 1889 to
The reasons which influenced the Government of
India in arriving at this decision were given in a Despatch 1 to the Secretary of State, in
which it was stated that the advance of Russia up to the frontiers of
Afghanistan, and the great development of her military resources in Asia, had
admittedly increased the necessity for strengthening our line of defence, ahd
that among the points requiring special attention were the northern passes of
the Hindu-Kush, which afford a difficult but not impracticable route for a
force large enough to cause excitement, if nothing worse, in Kashmir and
among the tribes of Bajour, and perhaps at Jelalabad and on the Punjab
frontier. This risk Government could not afford to disregard. It was pointed
out that Colonel Lockhart had submitted a scheme with the object of securing
this portion of our strategical frontier in 1886, but that his proposals
seemed to involve unnecessarily large expenditure, and that I had been sent
up the year before with orders to work out a |165 scheme on a more moderate scale, based on the
utilisation of the newly-to-be-created Kashmir Imperial Service Troops. The
objects in view were declared by Government to be the watching and control of
the country south of the Hindu-Kush, and the organisation of a force which
would be able in time of trouble to prevent any coup de main by a
small body of troops acting across the passes. The conditions seemed
favourable. The Mehtar ruled over a united Chitral, and had received our
officers with cordiality; his sons had been to
That the re-establishment of the Gilgit Agency |166 fulfilled the purposes of Government, and that our
influence was rendered paramount in this portion of the frontier south of the
Hindu-Kush, the following pages will show.
I was detained in
My instructions were that, the moment the
sanction of the Secretary of State was received to the proposals of
Government, I was to proceed to Gilgit, re-establish the Agency there, visit
Hunza and Nagar, and then march to Chitral. If feasible, I was to extend my march,
and visit the Khans of Dir and Umra Khan of Jandol. I meant to have another
try at the road from Chitral to
A still further vision now came to haunt and
disturb me, the reported existence of a pass called the Saltoro, which was
said to cross the Mustagh range north-east of Skardu in Baltistan, and to
give access to the Shimshal valley, and so to Hunza from the north. I knew
all about Younghusband's horrible experience in crossing the Mustagh at the
end of his great journey across
The Commander-in-Chief in
By the middle of June 1889 my preparations were
virtually complete, and the passes were open. I had a guard of the 20th
Punjab Infantry of sixteen |169 Pathans, all picked men, and splendid shots, and three orderlies from my own
regiment, the same men as the year before, one of whom had filled up part of
the intervening time by going with my brother to the borders of Sikkim.
About the middle of June we started. Robertson
had sprained his ankle and could not come and our hospital stores had not
arrived. I determined therefore to make a dash for Skardu in Baltistan, going
light from the Burzil pass, and to investigate the question of the Saltoro
pass on the spot. If a road existed, I meant to enter Hunza from the
north-east; if it did not, there would be plenty of time to reach Gilgit and
to enter Hunza as originally intended from that side. My assistant,
Lieutenant J. Manners-Smith, had been appointed from the Political
Department, and joined a few days before we left
We started accordingly without our doctor, and
three marches out at Gurais I received word that |170 the Gilgit Agency scheme had been sanctioned by the
Secretary of State. It was a great relief to get the business settled. For
months I had spun day-dreams, and thought out my various projects, and I was
getting sick of the indecision; but when the order finally came, from the
very fact of its being so long waited for, it brought none of the elation
which would have accompanied it months before. The expatriation and isolation
did not look so rosy, and I did not like the Hunza business much; a
foreboding warned me there would be difficulty.
But next morning things had taken their proper
place, and with the coveted appointment in my hand, and my own selected
friends going with me -- I did not know then one would so soon leave
me----everything was bright, and the interest increased every moment. Hard
work was before me, many bricks to make and but little straw at hand.
Satisfactory political relations had to be established with neighbouring States,
there were roads to be made, the whole of my kingdom to be explored, barracks
for troops to be built, telegraph lines to be opened, dispensaries to be
established, troops to be trained, cultivation to be increased, and
irrigation works to be undertaken. Last, but |171 not least, there was a modus vivendi to be
established with the Kashmir civil and military authorities at Gilgit, by
which I could get what I wanted without reducing them to the position of
ciphers. The longer I looked at the prospect, the pleasanter it seemed; if
you are to be exiled, the more work the better.
Leaving all the heavy camp to go by single
marches to Astor, we pushed on to the foot of the Burzil pass, from which the
road to Skardu branches off over the Deosai plains. We had a disastrous start
from the Burzil. First it poured with rain all night, so that we had to wait
till nearly nine in the morning to dry the tents partially before marching.
Then a stupid driver, instead of unloading the pony with all our stores, and
carrying the boxes over a foot-bridge, tried to ford the stream, which was
coming down in flood. The pony was carried of his legs, and swept three
hundred yards down stream where he managed to land. The mule trunks were of
course wet through, and all our tea, sugar, flour, and salt were ruined. I
sent back to our main camp for reserve stores, but no one knew where the
things were, and only a bag of sugar could be found and sent after us. This
was rather serious, as neither of us was |172 touching spirits, and we depended on our tea. We had to use some of the
horrible stuff the people of the country use, the worst form of refuse brick
tea, till we rejoined our camp a fortnight later.
We had a rise of fifteen hundred feet or so to
the Deosai plain, and then eight miles over snow, and, having started so
late, had a very bad time, for the sun had made the snow soft, and men and
animals were constantly going in up to their middles. The rest of the march
was easy but very wet, the ground soaked by melting snow, and streams to
cross at every few hundred yards. We were rather a draggled party when we
pitched camp, and the height, about twelve thousand feet, tried some of the
men, and gave them mountain sickness. One sepoy got into a most distressing
condition of breathlessness, and could not sleep. We had no doctor, and I did
not like to try tricks with drugs, so I gave him a brew of hot whisky and
water and quinine which sent him to sleep, and he was all right next day. We
were obliged, as he was a strict Mahomedan, to assure him that the mixture
was medicine and contained no wine.
The Deosai plain is a great basin about forty
miles across, averaging twelve thousand feet in height, and surrounded by a
circle of snows rising |173 three to four thousand feet higher. It is cut up by rolling spurs projecting
from the main ranges into numerous broad shallow valleys, through which run
rapid streams. We were too early in crossing it, and the grass had not
properly grown, though there were patches here and there and some flowers. It
was a most desolate scene. The bare plains stretch away for miles without the
vestige of a tree, and with only here and there a few patches of stunted
dwarf juniper. Later on, when the grass springs up, they become favourite
grazing grounds. We had to carry even the fuel for our camp, and of course
could get no supplies, as there is not a trace of habitation throughout the
plains. The only animal life is furnished by the marmots, which live there in
great numbers, and whose curious whistle sounds weirdly in keeping with their
surroundings.
We passed out of the plain by a razor-backed
pass, about fifteen thousand feet high, the last part of the ascent of which,
in greasy mud and soft snow, was very trying for baggage animals. The descent
to the Skardu plain is by a steep ravine which drops eight thousand feet in a
couple of short marches. It was a funnel down which a raging wind poured at
night, making a halt there hideous. |174 The
march down was very bad, the stream had to be crossed perpetually, each time
getting heavier and more dangerous. We had to make a chain of men across it
once or twice, and to pass the animals and laden coolies over above the men.
Even then we had an excitement, one man being swept away and only extricated
fifty yards down stream, half-drowned, and rather knocked about Skardu, the
capital of Baltistan, or Little Thibet, is picturesque; it is a village set
in cultivation, above which stands an old fort perched on a great rock,
washed by the waters of the Indus. The valley is several miles wide, mostly
an expanse of sand-hills and rocky mounds, with scattered stretches of
cultivation in between. It is shut in by huge bare mountains, with tremendous
cliffs and almost perpendicular shingle slopes, which close in at each end of
the valley so much that you seem to stand in a basin with absolutely no
outlet. We found Skardu possessed of an odious climate, consisting of
considerable heat in the daytime, and of a gale of wind at night, which
carried clouds of fine sand down the valley. It is said to be always windy
here, and consequently very cold in winter.
I found that to explore the reported road would
take me too long, and having received a telegram |175 directing me not to lose time, I prepared to start at
once for Astor. Later exploration showed that no pass existed over the
Saltoro, and that the tradition as to the existence of a road must have
descended from remote times. It is pretty evident that in this portion of the
Hindu-Kush the glaciers have advanced, for there seems good ground for
believing that Skardu, in Buddhist times, was on a well-used high road
leading to Kashgar, and that this high road has been closed by glaciers. It
was a relief to find that no easy pass led to the north, for its existence
would have very seriously affected the solution of the frontier problem.
I visited one most interesting relic of Buddhism
which the lenient Mahomedanism of the Baltis has spared. It is situated at
the mouth of a ravine leading up to the Deosai. A great rock, thirty feet
high by some fifteen wide, has fallen from the cliffs above, and lies at
present so close to the edge of the ravine that it was impossible to put up a
camera directly in front of it: a few more years will assuredly see it
undermined and falling forward into the ravine below. The rock faces almost
due east, and has been carved in situ. On the principal face is a
figure of the seated Buddha, surrounded by a frame of small seated Buddhas,
with a full length figure in |176 the
preaching attitude on each side; below is a beautifully-shaped vase, out of
which come sprays of the sacred lotus. Below this again is an inscription
partly worn away. On the south side of the rock there are a couple of
figures, but owing to the heavy wind and clouds of dust which pour down the
ravine they are much worn away. On the west side some other great stones lie
against the main rock, and on one is the outline of a Buddhist tope, but I
found nothing on the north face. The main sculpture was in perfect
preservation, but to my great regret the photographs I took of it were not a
success, owing to the great glare of the sun, and the inscription was not
deciphered.
The first march from Skardu was unlike anything
I had seen in the Hindu-Kush. The road ran through villages and cultivation,
and flat grassy commons, shaded for much of its length by avenues of willow
and poplar. It was easy marching, but part of the way very unpleasant: the
awful smell from the drying flats of the
The Baltis of to-day are a quiet inoffensive
race, though in old days they were ruled by adventurous kings, who carried
their conquering arms as far as Gilgit and Astor. They resemble the Thibetans
in appearance, and are for the most part flat-faced and short of stature,
though the mixture of Dogra and Kashmiri blood is often noticeable. This is
attributable to the lax morality of the women, a casual alliance with outside
strangers being apparently looked upon as an honour. The land under
cultivation is not sufficient to feed the population, and the existence of
polyandry is considered to be thus accounted for. The men leave the country
every year in hundreds to find work as labourers and carriers in Kashmir and
the hill stations of
The road we now were on was quite impossible for
baggage animals, it ran up a narrow valley in and out of huge blocks of rock,
and led one stumbling over the débris of great moraines for mile after
mile. The stream was very fine in places, coming down in a series of grand
cascades, sometimes a mile or more in length, cut through the old moraines.
To this succeeded quiet reaches and small pools, hardly to be dignified by
the name of lakes, and rolling uplands.
To reach the Astor valley I chose the road by
the Banok Lá, a pass fifteen thousand five hundred feet high, and we camped
the night before crossing at about thirteen thousand feet, in a shallow basin
surrounded by magnificent glaciers with pinnacles of granite, too steep to
hold snow, rising out of them. |179 The
moraines were full of marmots, and my fox-terriers went a-hunting, and were
brought back just before dark "a mask of blood," having been to
ground for hours, and interviewed the marmots in their homes with disastrous
results. The bite given by the marmot's long upper tusk is very severe, and
makes a wound such as a chisel struck by a hammer might inflict.
The ascent of the pass was pretty stiff; a
steady grind of two hours and a half over glacier and snow slope, some of it
to my mind none too safe for any one with no mountaineering knowledge or
appliances. The view from the top was superb: snow-covered glaciers
surrounded one; great granite peaks, jagged into the most fantastic shapes,
shot out of them; a wall of snow mountains rose ahead, and towering above all
was the mass of Nanga Parbat. I loitered on the top of the pass for some time
drinking in the glorious scene, and then plunged down over sloping snow-beds
covering the glaciers, so as to get clear before the sun softened the crust.
Once off the snow the path was bad: first descending the terminal face of the
moraine, then running for many miles over lateral moraines and shingle slopes
till we got to grass; after this it wound through thickets of myrtle and
masses of forget-me-not of every colour, |180 ranging from heaven's loveliest blue through pink to white.
We camped well above the birch in a grassy
Alpine meadow, and next day a long double march of about thirty miles took us
to Astor. The first part of the way was through pine forest, the glades
covered with marguerites, violet and white; then the path ran along hillsides
one mass of spirea, the air thick with its honey-like scent; and dropped
gently down, passing a chain of small lakes, grass and willow bordered, the
end of the valley blocked for many miles by a superb view of Nanga Parbat standing
entirely alone. The last part of the march was very hot and trying,
especially after we reached the Astor valley and got on to the bare slopes
again, but even here there was beauty on all sides, and we passed through
masses of a flower like a hollyhock, mostly of delicate white, but some of a
lovely pink.
At Astor we were met by Raja Bahadur Khan and
conducted to our camp. Here I found a collection of letters, and spent a
couple of days resting my camp, working off arrears of official
correspondence, and inspecting the Kashmir troops, whose condition was
deplorable. Robertson rejoined me here, wild to go into Kafiristan, and
utterly dissatisfied with the appointment at Gilgit, to his holding which we
had |181 both looked forward with so much pleasure. He proposed,
if Government agreed to his going, that some young doctor should be sent up
to Gilgit to take his place. I was, naturally, much disappointed, but could
not stand in his way, and we parted, two months later, in Chitral.
No other doctor was sent up that year, owing to
official delays, and the result was that we were left with no one to look
after the hundreds of troops in the Gilgit Command, to organise dispensaries
and medical arrangements in the country, a thing to which I attached the greatest
importance, or to take care of the personnel of the Agency. The
medical work was retarded by a year, and there was unnecessary suffering
among the troops, for the hospitals, such as they were, were useless.
I remained a few days at Astor to make myself
acquainted with the local conditions, inspected the fort and the grain
stores, and explored the hillsides for the site of a summer camp. The barrack
accommodation, and the sanitary conditions were dreadful, and the water
poisonous, but no one seemed to mind. We found a splendid site for hutting
troops three miles above the fort, in a large alpine meadow. It was a natural
parade-ground, surrounded by splendid fir forests, watered by pure streams
which |182 welled out from the foot of a moraine, behind which a
glacier stretched up into the mass of
There was nothing new about the march to Bunji,
which place we reached in due course. I inspected the troops and fort here,
and found forty per cent, of the former useless, and the latter wholly so.
The housing of the men, the sanitary arrangements, the warehouses for stores
and supplies, were hopelessly bad, while against any serious attack the fort
was impossible to defend. The men were terribly ill-fed, and all from
eighteen months to two years in arrears of pay; in many cases they had drawn
absolutely not a penny for eight months, and for some time previous to that
an equivalent in English money of only two shillings a month. Most of them
had received no uniform for several years, though stoppages had regularly
been made from their pay for its supply. It was a marvel how the troops
existed, but the Dogra is the most patient of men, |183 and there was nothing to be gained by deserting. The
irregular regiments were in the most terrible condition, mostly composed of
worn-out old men or of boys, and half the force existed only on paper. I
calculated that of all the troops fully seventy-five per cent, were unfit to
serve.
A couple of days gave me time to consider what
steps were most urgently required to put the fort in a proper state for
defence, and to go into the most pressing question regarding the increase in
the water-supply. On increased water-supply depended increased cultivation,
and on this hinged the question of feeding the troops. An inspection of the
available positions for a new and safer ferry over the Indus followed, and an
afternoon's fishing at the mouth of a stream running into the Indus, where we
got fairly good sport. The
A few more days saw us in Gilgit, where I spent
a fortnight waiting for my stores and baggage, getting into touch with the
local authorities, and in preparing for my visit to Hunza and Nagar. I had
received a letter while on the road from the Resident, asking me, in the name
of the Kashmir Council, to receive a large sum of money which was |184 being sent up, and to see myself personally to the
payment of the troops. This was a fairly strong reflection on the honesty of
the
The local authorities were, of course, furious
at being deprived of the grand opportunity for plunder, which the passage of
twenty-five thousand pounds through their fingers would have given, and
opposition to the Agency, and to the order's and interests of their own
Government, began at once. The treacherous official, who had betrayed the
Besides being engaged in a duel with the very
people who ought to have been helping me, I had plenty of work. The fort, the
strongest in the Hindu-Kush in some ways, had to be thoroughly overhauled,
and a scheme worked out for hutting the troops, who were huddled together in
pitch dark hovels in which it was impossible to stand upright, and in which
the stench could be cut with a knife. The drainage and water-supply of the
fort had to be gone into, the head-waters of the canal which |186 irrigated the Gilgit oasis visited, and some plan for
its improvement devised; a good house for a hospital had to be found, and the
drugs and paraphernalia stored, to be useless, alas! for a whole year, and
lastly, my own house had to be put in order. The envoys from Hunza and Nagar
had to be interviewed, and the details of my visit to these States arranged.
I entirely declined to ask for hostages, as had formerly been the custom, and
dismissed the hostages sent by Hunza, with handsome presents. Nagar, I felt,
would give no trouble. Hunza was different, and was none too safe, but I did
not believe that the presence of a relation of the chief's in Gilgit would
prevent our throats being cut; and it seemed to me more dignified not to
bargain for our safety, but to trust to straightforward dealing on the spot,
and to dry powder. The Governor of Gilgit was horrified at my manner of doing
business, and took, I heard, a most gloomy view of the situation; it was in
so many people's interest apparently to incite an attack upon us, and an
attack on a small party like ours, in a country with the natural difficulties
offered by Hunza, could have but one result----we should have been wiped out
to a man.
It was the middle of August before we left
Gilgit, and the heat was very great. The first march to |187 Nomal presented nothing but the normal difficulties, and
was on the whole good. The fort, which had been besieged the year before, was
a fairly strong one, but was commanded on three sides by modern rifle fire,
and was as usual insanitary and crowded. The next two marches to Chalt, the
actual frontier post, were very trying; the road ran between great cliffs in
a narrow gorge worn by the raging river, and the heat was intense. The parris
were the worst we had seen, so bad indeed that we could not take our horses
with us. The Chaichar Parri, the last before we reached Chalt, was a famous
position, the outpost to the Hunza-Nagar valley, and one which had never been
forced. No horse had ever been taken over the cliff, which had been purposely
left in its impassable state, the path running across a hideous precipice on
the narrowest possible shelf only a few inches wide. Biddulph describes this
piece of road as worse than any ground he had ever crossed when stalking in
the mountains, and it certainly was pretty bad. We were met on the far side
by a deputation from Nagar, with horses for our use. The Chalt fort had only
been held on sufferance by the Kashmir troops; it was a miserable square
enclosure, with no proper command over its water-supply, and was dominated by
another fort occupied by the Nagar |188 people, and situated within a couple of hundred yards.
I was joined on my march by Raja Bahadur Khan of
Astor, who was closely connected by marriage with both the Hunza and Nagar
ruling families, and by Raja Akbar Khan of Punyal. I was anxious to show that
it was our policy to be on good terms with the natural leaders of the people
of the country, and the
The position of the small States of Hunza and
Nagar, which I was about to visit, is unique; as Biddulph says, "they
probably present the spectacle of a race living under almost the same
conditions now as their forefathers did fourteen centuries ago." Shut in
by a girdle of practically impassable mountains, they had maintained their
independence for centuries, though both States apparently had at different
times acknowledged the suzerainty of the rulers of Gilgit, and latterly had
bound themselves to respect that of Kashmir, and to pay it tribute. |189 The relations of Hunza to Kashmir, and through that
State with the Government of India, were complicated by the fact that the
Chief of Hunza also recognised the suzerainty of China, paid a nominal
tribute to, and received presents in. return from its ruler. The two States,
which are divided only by a river which runs in a bed six hundred feet wide
between cliffs three hundred feet high, are inhabited generally by people of
the same stock, speaking the same language, professing the same form of the Mahomedan
religion, and are ruled by princes sprung from the same family.
Notwithstanding all this, or more correctly perhaps because of it, they have
been for centuries persistent rivals, always at war with each other, but
always ready to unite against a common invader, even when that invader had
been called in by the one State in order to assist it in coercing the other. The State of
Safdar Ali, the Thum at the time of my visit,
had murdered his father, Ghazan Khan, three years previously, and his
character caused me some anxiety. He had, it is true, as had the Nagar chief,
written to Government, and asked that a mission should be sent to him, but he
bore an ill name for treachery, cruelty, and weakness. In common with most of
his subjects he belonged to the Maulai sect, the followers of which, though
calling themselves Shiahs, were a bye-word on the frontier for their
shameless violation of all the leading Mahomedan doctrines. The men drank
wine freely; their morals were of the loosest; a man considered himself
honoured if his wife attracted the Thum's attentions, and hospitality
enjoined that he should offer her to his guest. Withal, they were cheery,
pleasant people to deal |193 with, slight, wiry, and very active, first-rate mountaineers, and of untiring
energy, a great contrast to the Shins of Gilgit. With none of the bloodthirsti-ness
of the Pathan they yet had a great reputation for bravery, and had more than
once invaded and severely handled their Nagar neighbours, who wore said never
to have carried the war into their country. The cultivation in Hunza is very
limited; the finest stretch is just below the fort of the chief, and extends
for some six and a half miles in length with a width of from a mile to a mile
and a half, the whole of the land being irrigated. This main stretch of
arable land, which is studded with villages, lies at an altitude of eight
thousand feet, and faces south, and the climate here is delightful. Further
up the valley lie scattered patches of cultivation, getting poorer and poorer
as the altitude increases. The mountains enclosing the valley are very
precipitous even for the Hindu-Kush; wood and grazing for cattle are
therefore unusually scarce, and the people suffer in consequence. The
clothing of the people is practically the same both in Hunza and Nagar as it
is in Ghitral, and has been described before, the only difference being that
the men's stockings are not knitted in such elaborate patterns, and that, as
a general rule, the woollen outer robe is, in Hunza especially, more |194 often white than brown. All, except on State
occasions when the higher ranks don the turban, wear the Dard head-dress.
This is a long bag of brown woollen cloth rolled back on itself till it forms
a cap, which is one fold thick on the top, with a border an inch or so thick
round the head. It makes a light, warm, and delightfully comfortable
head-dress, but is a very poor protection against severe sun.
Nagar, as most of the surrounding people and the
inhabitants themselves generally call it, though they also pronounce the word
Nagér, and the scientific, for some cause best known to themselves, insist on
spelling it Nagyr, is a smaller State than Hunza, The population is
about the same, and is composed of Yeshkuns, professing themselves Shiahs,
but very nearly as lax in their Mahomedanism as the people of Hunza. There is
considerably more cultivation than in Hunza, the land is better watered, and
the main slopes of the mountains enclosing the country face north, and are
consequently covered with forest. The land has the full benefit of the summer
sun, and the crops are splendid. The untold profusion of the apricots, and
the quantity of gold which can be washed out of every stream, has gained the
country amongst the Nagaris themselves the name of "the land of gold and
apricots." The people, though of |195 identically the same stock as those of Hunza, show marked differences. They
are less warlike than their neighbours; they were never implicated in the
raiding of caravans, owing principally perhaps to there being no outlet to
the north or east leading to caravan tracks; they are, on the whole, better
off, owing to the better agricultural conditions, and the possession of
splendid grazing grounds; and last, but not least, slavery is unknown amongst
them----that is, they would not brook their king selling them or their children,
and the exile of the present ruler's eldest son is said to have been caused
by his attempt to introduce the custom from Hunza. The men are not so bright
and cheery as their Hunza cousins; they strike one as more sedate and morose,
and their reputation for dash and gallantry is far lower. The reason they
themselves assign for the difference, and the one generally accepted, is that
in the winter, when the sun is in the south, the great mountains backing
their valley shut out all the light and warmth, of which Hunza facing south
enjoys the full benefit, and that the depressing effect of passing day after
day in the cold and darkness of their uncomfortable houses leaves an
indelible mark on the national character.
It must be remembered that a house in the Hindu-Kush
has no glass windows, no comfortable fire-place |196 and chimney corner. The better-class houses are built
round a courtyard, but the rooms rarely have windows, all light comes from
the open door or from a skylight. Immediately below the skylight is a square
open hearth, on which smoulders a fire; round this run raised platforms, on
which are the beds and household paraphernalia; the smoke, before escaping
through the roof, fills the whole room, blackens walls and pillars, and
chokes the unfortunate inhabitants. If it is very cold, or raining and
snowing heavily, the skylight is shut, the room is in pitchy darkness but for
a sputtering torch, and the atmosphere horrible. It is no wonder that an
existence under these circumstances should be rather depressing, and in Nagar
the people get the full benefit of it, for there are several villages which
during December and January only get twenty minutes' sun a day; some, I
believe, get none. The men having no agricultural work on hand, owing to the
land being frost-bound, there is practically nothing for them to do during
the winter months but to sit idly round their smouldering fires for about
sixteen hours out of the twenty-four.
Nagar has practically no outlet except down the
river to Gilgit. Shut in to the east by impassable mountains, and to the
south by the great Rakapushi |197 range, there is only the bare possibility of reaching Baltistan by the Hispar
pass: there is a tradition that the road was once used, but it is very
doubtful if the story is true. It needs a mountaineer properly equipped to
make use of this road, which runs over one of the greatest glacier masses of
the world, as Sir Martin Conway shows in his book, "Climbing and
Exploration in the Karakoram Himalayas." Dependent therefore on Gilgit
for their luxuries, such as weapons, cotton cloth, salt, sugar, etc., most of
them the produce of India, or on Hunza for the products of Turkestan and
Central Asia, the Nagar people were more easily squeezable than their
neighbours across the water, and not so aggressively insolent in their
dealings with Kashmir. They were as little to be trusted, however. It was one
of their chiefs who many years ago called in the
1. * NOTE.----Blue Book
Correspondence relating to Chitral, C. 7864, 1895.
CHAPTER
V
VISIT
TO HUNZA NAGAR
AT Chalt I dismissed the Nagar men who had come
to Gilgit to act as hostages during my absence, and sent them away well
pleased. The Nagar people seemed to be really keen on my visiting their
country, and the Hunza representative with me explained the rather doubtful
tone of his master's letters by the fact that the Thum was suffering severely
from fever. In addition to this, which might delay our interviews, the chief
feared that the height of the river, which was in full flood, might make our
journey difficult and dangerous. In the whole course of the river only two
bridges existed, both of them twig rope suspension bridges, one at Chalt, the
other exactly opposite Hunza, and there was no other means of crossing the
river when in flood. There had been latterly some ill-feeling between the
Hunza-Nagar Chiefs, and the upper bridge had not been repaired, neither side
caring to take the trouble when it might become necessary to cut the bridge
at a |200 moment's notice. However, I heard that the relations
were no longer strained, and that the bridge was now being renewed by the
Nagar people, who had practically the monopoly of the necessary birch. Our
crossing into Hunza was therefore assured, and I received civil enough
letters from the Thum repeating his invitations. His epistolary style was
always quaint and high-flown, and on this occasion, when welcoming me, he
compared my party to "camels without nose-ropes uncontrolled,"
meaning by this that we were free to wander at our pleasure in all
directions. In a former letter he had, with reference to the difficulty of
supplying our party, compared us to elephants. On a later occasion he
incidentally remarked that he proposed to send my head on a charger as a
present to the Government of India: but there was a good deal to come before
that.
Crossing a mile above Chalt the rope bridge over
the Hunza river, which seemed the longest and steepest we had yet crossed,
though that over the Gilgit river had a span of three hundred and sixty feet,
we found ourselves in Nagar territory, the first Europeans who had ever
penetrated its mysterious wilds. The bridge was a new one, fortunately for
us, for they are very unsafe when old, and should be |201 renewed annually. This involves a good deal of labour,
as nine cables of twisted birch twigs of the necessary length, in this case
some four hundred and fifty feet, have to be prepared. The people therefore
often put off the work and chance the bridge lasting, and I have seen bridges
three and four years old in use. This is horribly dangerous; the birch twigs
dry and perish, and the ropes break suddenly. As a rule they do not go all
together, and I have seen a bridge in use consisting only of the foot rope
and one side rope, and have crossed them when the connecting ropes were
broken and useless, but I never did so willingly, for we had a terrible
lesson. A native officer and half a dozen men had been sent on from Gilgit
ahead of us to try the bridges, and to arrange for necessary repairs. Corning
to one bridge they tried it carefully, going over one at a time, and
examining the anchorage and ropes. Thinking all was sound they foolishly
returned in a body, crossing, of course, one behind the other. As the leading
man got well up the slope towards the timber anchorage, followed by five
others, the ropes drew or broke, and the whole party were dashed into the
water. Two men, entangled in the ropes, were washed ashore on the bank they
had started from, for the anchorages on the far side fortunately held, |202 and the ropes swung across the stream and ashore, but
the other unfortunates, caught in the awful torrent, were swept away and
instantly drowned. Only one body was recovered, and that forty miles down
stream.
The road shortly after crossing the river rose
twelve hundred feet to cross the end of a spur from Rakapushi, and,
descending again, ran generally at a level of six or eight hundred feet above
the river---- which one could hear roaring through its deep-cut bed
below----across uncultivated wastes, and in and out of numerous deep ravines
till the cultivation of Nilt was reached. Here Uzr Khan, the eldest living
son, and the heir-apparent of the ruling chief, Jafr Khan, met us. He was rather
a fine-looking fellow, with a pleasant enough face when he smiled, but with
generally a boorish and sulky expression. He received us very cordially, and
after we had breakfasted under a fine plane tree he came and discussed
affairs. I could see that my main difficulty would be to persuade my new
friends that we had come to Gilgit to stay. Biddulph's withdrawal had made
them very chary of having anything to do with us.
I examined the country very carefully as we
marched, and noted the difficulty of the great ravine behind Nilt, which
three years later was to baffle for |203 eighteen days the attack of our troops. On the whole the road was better than
I expected, and it seemed to me, as I find noted in my diary, "that a
decently-armed and led force should not have much difficulty in forcing its
way in." My hosts were not averse to my sketching, and I had a road
sketch and report made every day, but I did not like to make too much of it,
and contented myself personally with noting the positions and the chances of
attack they offered. The conclusion I eventually arrived at was that the
Hunza-Nagar country presented the most appalling difficulties, and that, with
well-armed men holding the country, an advance into it would be terribly
costly.
The views of Rakapushi were very fine, though
not so grand as I had hoped, for we were marching too close under it. Still,
a mountain rising nineteen thousand feet above you, and over twenty-five
thousand feet in height, must be fine when you get a glimpse of it. The next
day's march was, however, far more striking; the road rose over gigantic
moraine masses, crossing ravine after ravine seven and eight hundred feet
deep, each one filled up by the end of a glacier, the main mass of which was
out of sight. We passed through numerous villages whose cultivation, carried
far up the mountain side, was of the |204 richest. Each village was surrounded by fruit trees, and poplar, plane, and
walnut trees abounded. Every village was either enclosed in a large square
fort, with towers at each corner, or had a fort close to it.
The third day took us into Nagar. On leaving
camp we crossed a great shingle slope, nearly a mile in length, at a point
hundreds of feet above the river. Huge cliffs crowned the slope, and made
this one of the most difficult pieces of road, from a military point of view,
that we had yet passed. During our two last marches we saw conglomerate
cliffs and rocks full of garnets, some very fine white sandstone, and in one
place a cliff of clay, which was said to be full of gold. Nagar lies off the
main valley, some three miles up another stream, and the last few miles into
it the road ran almost without interruption through cultivation. The fruit
trees were a sight to see, apricot trees bending under a burden of red gold
fruit, their harvest just beginning, and every house roof, and any other
available flat space, was covered with the fruit drying in the sun. As we
turned our backs on the main valley the view was superb. Behind us Rukapushi
rose in gigantic precipices of thousands of feet of snow and ice, while
across the river above Hunza towered another great mountain, its crest broken
by sharp granite peaks on which no snow can rest. Its |205 lower spurs are jagged and bare, and below them lay a
large semi-circle, one mass of villages and of cultivation, the terraced
fields carried right down into the river bed. Hunza itself lies on the right
bank of a ravine ending in a dark glacier, from whose melting ice is supplied
the channel which waters the whole of the Hunza cultivation. The houses of
the main village are clustered tier upon tier on a high spur crowned by the
Thum's Castle. The arrangement at Nagar is precisely the same.
Our entry into Nagar was very similar to my last
year's entry into Chitral, only that the crowd was on a smaller scale, the
courtiers not so numerous or so brilliantly arrayed. Still it was picturesque
enough; before us rode a man bearing a scarlet and white banner; around us,
wherever the road permitted, was the gay crowd in
Next morning I paid my state visit to Raja Jafr
Khan. The road runs up through the village to the Thum's Castle, under a
succession of easily defensible doorways, which would make an assault very
difficult for bad troops or local enemies. The Palace stairs consisted of the
trunk of a tree with notches cut in it, which led up through a square hole in
the floor to the terraced rooms above. In this, as in every other house I
ever entered in these wilds, the last two of three doors are placed in the
right angle turn of a very narrow passage which only one man can use at a time,
and the doorways are so low that a tall man has to bend almost double to pass
through them. The object is to prevent a rush, and to make it impossible for
a man to use his weapons as he passes through the last doorway. Similarly the
ascent to the flat-topped roof of a man's house is jealously guarded, and he
who considers himself in any danger never sleeps twice in the same part of
his room, for the skylight gives an enemy a convenient point of vantage from
which to shoot.
We found the Thum in a typical square room, with
an open skylight, and a sunk hearth in the floor, seated by a balconied
window, from which there was an extensive view over his country. His beard
was carefully dyed, and it was difficult to guess his age, but |207 he was not an old man; drink and debauchery had reduced
him to his present state, and paralysed him from the waist down. We did not
stop long, as the visit was merely one of ceremony, and the audience room was
full of people, before whom business could not be discussed. Our uniforms
were a source of much interest to our hosts, and of considerable discomfort
to ourselves. Frock coats and spiked helmets, high boots and spurs, sword and
sabretache, are not quite the thing for the grand staircases of the country.
Later in the day Uzr Khan paid me a visit, and we had to sit through an
interminable dance programme, which, as the orchestra consisted of six pairs
of kettle-drums, six large drums beaten at both ends, and three pipes, was
simply deafening. The dances were all very much the same----six or eight men
following each other round and round in a circle---- sometimes with sword and
shield and the usual flourishes, sometimes with nothing in their hands, now
posturing slowly, again flying round with long jumps and steps. In Nagar every
one dances----the younger sons of the Thum, Wazirs, and the common herd, all
take part. In the pre-Mahomedan days the women also danced, and I should not
be surprised if amongst, themselves they did not even now join in, but, of
course, not on a state occasion, or before |208 strangers. Immediately after the dance came a couple of
hours of polo, still to the accompaniment of the band, which played just
below our tents, and whose monotonous noise became maddening.
In the evening I dismissed the son of the Hunza
Wazir, who had come with letters from the Thum, with my answer and a present.
He was good enough to express himself quite satisfied personally, at which I
was surprised, for he was wearing a coat of velvet covered with gold
embroidery, worth at least five-and-twenty pounds, the outcome of Lockhart's
lavish habits of largesse. It was a much more magnificent garment than any I
had to give his master, and of much greater value than the present I could
afford to give him. He informed me, however, that a scoundrel with him, to
whom I had given some money and a choga, was going away hopeless, because I
had not promised to renew to him a pension which his father had drawn from
the Kashmir Durbar. They were difficult people to deal with in some ways, showed
no sense of proportion in making their demands, and really, I believe, could
not understand that there must be some limit to one's power of giving
rewards.
The next few days were passed in private
interviews and negotiations with Jafr Khan and his son. |209 The former I found very sensible and amenable, but Uzr
Khan showed himself day by day more stupid and boorish. He was below the
average of the chiefs I had met with in intelligence, and had none of their
diplomatic skill. Still I got a good deal of information out of him as to the
course of events during the preceding years, an insight into the politics of
the country, and a knowledge of the men likely to be important, Here, as in
Chitral, the danger of bloodshed and trouble from the enmity of the royal
brothers was but too plain.
The only amusement I got out of the negotiations
came from the request, put forward by the Chief, that his Wazirs should be
granted some pension. I readily agreed, on the condition that the amounts
should be deducted from his subsidy, and that of his son. I heard no more of
this proposal. After we had had our final State interview, and had sent the
old Chief his presents, I held an informal reception of all the Wazirs and
head men, gave them presents and robes of honour, and left them fairly
satisfied.
During our stay in Nagar we wandered about
photographing, in search of anything of archaeological importance. The most
interesting thing I saw was a Buddhist chorten, and naturally my camera was
not to be found at the moment. The building was in |210 several tiers, stood some fifteen feet high, was
circular, with a diameter of about six feet, and was finished off with a
crown-shaped storey. I expected to pass that way again, and promised myself
to photograph and measure it carefully, but I never saw it more.
We paid several visits to the great glacier
which comes to within two or three miles of Nagar from the mountains to the
south. It was at this time, late in August, very black and dirty, a mass of
irregular columns and broken surfaces, with only one clean white piece, that
just above the ice arch, through which the torrent forced its way out. I had
no time to go further up the valley, though I should much have liked to have
gone up another sixteen miles to see the Hispar glacier, that wonderful
stream of ice, forty miles long from the crest of the pass to the foot of the
glacier, which at one time must have reached Nagar itself.
The whole country about Nagar and Hunza is
carved out by glacier action; gigantic moraines, the skeletons of dead and
gone glaciers, meet you on all sides; above Nagar is a wild tangle of ground,
where three huge glaciers fought for the mastery; above Hunza, lakebeds and
moraines meet you at every turn.
The road to this point from Nagar was very
pretty, running entirely through cultivation and orchards, and occasionally
under the walls of a village fort. The people were evidently very hard
working, and the cultivation and labour expended on walling the fields was
most thorough. At some villages they used to bring us out presents of fruit,
and at all they were civil and pleasant They are a nice people, and
independent. One old man was very indignant at |212 the men with us for passing along the edge of his field
where there was no footpath. We came in one place on an amusing instance of
the world-wide tendency to scamp Government work. We were crossing a field
which I noticed was very badly gleaned, and I asked the reason. I was told it
was one of the Thum's, and that, as the villagers had to cultivate and reap
it for him, they did not take as much trouble as if it had been their own.
A boy came along with us one day, and played on
a long pipe with a very sweet note. It was quite a pastoral. The last we saw
of him he was wandering below us on a classic lawn, by the side of a stream
which ran flecked with sunlight under the shadow of great walnut trees,
playing his pipe, whose plaintive notes floated up to us, mingled with the
murmur of the water. His dard cap was ornamented with a garland of red and
white flowers stuck into its folds.
I had to leave Nagar long before I had exhausted
the objects of interest, and many places had perforce to be left unvisited.
The morning we left we plunged down below the fort for several hundred feet
to the rope bridge which spans the gorge of the Nagar stream. It was a nasty
bridge, with very steep slopes, and I thought one of the servants had gone,
for he stumbled badly; but he recovered himself, |213 and merely dropped a bundle he was for some reason
carrying, which went floating down amongst masses of ice which, broken from
the glacier above, were dancing down the furious stream. There was a stiff
climb up a couple of thousand feet to the crest of the ridge between the two
streams, and an equally steep descent down to the Hunza river. The approach
to the bridge, which springs from two great masses of rock on each side of
the river, is villainous, over smooth rock and by pathways a few inches wide,
kept bad for safety's sake. We were met by various deputations----one shortly
after entering Hunza territory, a second at the bridge, a third on the Hunza
bank, and I found it was arranged that we should camp directly we got to the
top of the cliff above the river, and that we should make our state entry
next day. Accustomed to these ceremonious delays from my experience of
Chitral, I agreed.
Next morning we started at about half-past seven
in uniform, and rode up through the terraced cultivation to the polo ground.
Here we were requested to halt, while our salute was being fired by the Wazir
in person, he being the only man who could be trusted to fire the gun. It was
a gun with a history, which had been cast by a refugee from Wakhan, all the
brass household implements in the |214 country having been melted down to find metal for it. The Thum of the day was
so pleased at possessing it that he at once killed the maker, lest he should
go to Nagar and make one there. The Wazir had instructions from his King to
go on firing till further orders, but after twenty-three guns we thought they
had had enough, and I sent a request that they would stop and let us proceed.
We were met at the gate of the fort by Wazir Dadu, rather a pleasant-looking
man of about forty-five.
The approach to the fort through the village was
much the same as at Nagar, but the road was broader. As we passed over the
great water channel which fertilises the Hunza oasis, and which at its
debouchere from the parent ravine runs through a low tunnel, an ominous
whisper informed me that this was the scene of the old Thum's murder by his
rascally son, assisted by his present Wazir, Dadu. The old man was fired at
from the roof of a house as he rode in from hawking. The first discharge was
not fatal, and the men with the Thum begged him to take refuge for a moment
in the irrigation tunnel while they raised help, which, by all accounts, was
within an ace of coming, but the old Chief refused, saying, "It was no
use; he had lived long |215 enough, and his day was come." His Wazir, Humayum, Dadu's elder brother,
was away in Gujhal at the time, and the new Chief sent him an urgent letter,
stamped with his father's seal, calling him to return at once to Hunza. But
though the letter had been prepared beforehand, was sealed before the warmth
was out of the old Chiefs body, and was despatched by a trusted messenger, the
plot failed. Warned by some friend, or distrusting the wording of the letter,
Humayum turned his horse's head, and rode for his life. He reached the passes
in safety, and going by Wakhan, entered Chitral, and claimed the hospitality
of the Mehtar. This was gladly accorded him, for he was a valuable man in
case of trouble with Hunza, and he remained in Chitral, an honoured guest,
until his turn came later. Once inside the fort we had only two sets of
stairs to ascend, and they were not so primitive as in Nagar, though they
were equally defensible. We were received by the Thum at the top, and seated
on an open platform overlooking the village and valley. Safdar Ali Khan was a
delicate-looking young man of about twenty-two, with shifty Mongolian eyes,
and a chestnut-coloured small peaked beard and moustache. The face was a
delicate oval in shape, and weak in expression. He was |216 looking decidedly ill, and considerably pulled down by
fever.
The surroundings were richer than in Nagar. A
guard of fifteen men armed with breechloaders, English and Russian,
surrounded the Chief; the courtiers were better dressed, and good Central
Asian carpets were spread on the ground. The Thum himself was handsomely
dressed in silks, and wore a beautiful velvet belt of Chinese workmanship,
with clasps and bosses of gold studded with torquoise and coral. We stayed
but a short time, paying a purely ceremonial visit. On my return to camp I
found that the four men of my guard had been prevented from coming upstairs,
and that an attempt had been made at stopping my orderlies also. I
accordingly at once sent up to the Wazir, and protested against this, saying
that I concluded that my men had been stopped without the Chiefs knowledge,
and that I would not stand being treated in this way for a moment. My message
brought a full apology, but the incident showed the tendency to insolence on
the Chiefs part, for which I was prepared, and that it was necessary to prove
to the young savage that we were not afraid of him, and should insist on being
treated with proper distinction. |217
The Thum sent down during the day a dinner for
the whole camp, among the ingredients for which was a half-bred yak. In the
old days throughout these regions the chief guest had to cut off the beast's
head, or, at all events, to strike the first blow with his sword. This part
of the ceremony we dispensed with, but we ate the resulting beef, the first
we had tasted since leaving
In the afternoon we went for a walk and admired
the cultivation, which is extraordinarily careful, the terraced fields
falling in one continuous sheet to the river hundreds of feet below. Every
inch of available ground is made use of, and we found many miniature fields a
couple of feet wide and a dozen feet in length, telling of the pressure of
the population, and the difficulty of the food supply. I had heard a
tradition that during the fruit season the people were prohibited from eating
any form of |218 bread or grain, but I was told that this was not the
case. What does happen here, and throughout the region of the Eastern
Hindu-Kush, is that the fruit crops are so prolific that the people naturally
live largely on them in summer. Even the animals take to a fruit diet, and
you see donkeys, cows, and goats eating the fallen mulberries. The very dogs
feed on them, and our fox-terriers took to the fruit régime most
kindly, and became quite connoisseurs in the different kinds of mulberry,
preferring the "Shahtut," the king mulberry, a large luscious
purple fruit, to all others.
The great water channel referred to before
deserves passing mention. Its head waters are some half a mile up the ravine,
on the edge of which Hunza stands, a few hundred feet below the end of the
glacier which feeds it. For the whole of this half mile the water channel is
a monument of patient labour, and of the clever adaption of the rudest means
to the most important end. It is carried across the face of a cliff, in some
places of sheer rock, in others of hard conglomerate. Sometimes it runs along
the top of a built-up wall thirty or forty feet high, at others through
carefully excavated channels in the conglomerate which avoid the difficulties
of a sharp corner by tunnelling through it. |219 Where the face of the rock is perpendicular, and its
foot washed by the torrent is unsuitable for the foundations of a retaining
wall, the water flows through timber troughs, supported by wooden brackets
adroitly fixed into the cliff. I did not measure the output, but, roughly,
the channel must have at its widest a section of four and a half feet wide by
one foot deep, which means a considerable flow of water. On this channel the
cultivation of Hunza proper entirely depends; should it fail, starvation
stares the people in the face. It is not surprising, therefore, that the
greatest care should be expended on its preservation. But what is wonderful
is the excellence of the result arrived at. It must be remembered that the people
have no proper tools, no crowbars and dynamite to assist them. A tiny pick of
soft iron, which looks like a child's garden tool, shovels fashioned out of
wood, and a few poles as levers, are all that they have to work with. The use
of mortar is unknown; all their walls are of dry masonry. Yet with all these
disadvantages, with nothing but their eye as a guide to levels, they have
carried this great irrigation channel for six miles, and turned an arid
desert into a garden. For the most part it is true it runs along the side of
a gently sloping mountain, but it also crosses many deep and |220 perpendicular-sided ravines, and encounters masses of
rock which have to be circumvented. It is a splendid work, and I admired it
more every time I walked along it.
The Thum was too unwell with fever to return my
visit, and his Wazir came in his stead. Robertson went up to see the Chief,
and prescribed for him, with the result that the descendant of Alexander, as
he considered and called himself, got into a state of abject terror, thought
his last hour was come, and refused to take the second dose which was the
natural sequence of the first. Robertson reported that he was a coward, that
he had literally funked himself into a state of great nervousness and a sort
of nettle-rash five minutes after he had. taken his first dose, which should
not have taken effect for an hour. This sounded bad, for a rank coward is a
dangerous man to deal with.
The views from our little camp by the polo
ground were superb, especially in the afternoons; the great sugar-loaf peak
of Dirran, just opposite, seemed to float and melt in the pale blue sky, and
Rakapushi was glorious, with great dashes of sunlight at his base, and bands
of clouds resting high up, the great peaks standing out above.
And now came the important interviews at which
business had to be discussed. The first one was |221 quite satisfactory. I found the Thum in a small open
room or court leading into the private apartments, and we sat down to discuss
business. It was obvious that the Wazir was the important man, but also that
the Thum, cowardly, shifty, and with a ridiculous idea of his own importance,
must be reckoned with very carefully. Everything passed off well, and the
Government conditions were readily assented to, the most important one at the
moment being the promise of a free passage to Younghusband, who was to come
to Gilgit in November from the Pamirs. Wazir Dadu amused us very much when
the question of raiding was raised. He made no attempt at denying that this
was the custom of the country, and explained it by saying that Hunza was a
poor state, and that necessarily its people looted. The evident enjoyment
with which he referred to former exploits, and the expressive grin which
accompanied his explanations, were too much for me, and I had to join in the
general laugh.
We parted good friends, but in the evening came
a letter from the Thum, asking for the same subsidy for his son as had been
promised to Raja Uzr Khan of Nagar. As his son was about four years old and
Uzr Khan thirty, I thought this was pretty cool In the morning came rather an
insolent verbal |222 message to the effect
that unless the boy's subsidy was granted, my surveyor would not be allowed
to proceed to the north, where there was some surveying work to be done. This
was in direct contravention of the agreement entered into, but I took no
notice, as we were to pay our farewell visits that day. After breakfast,
accordingly, we went up and had a long talk, which was quite satisfactory
until the question of the boy's subsidy came up. It was useless to point out
that Raja Uzr Khan's grant was taken out of his father's, that he was a grown
man, with much weight in the country, and that the case of the small boy
would doubtless be considered when he came of age, if his father was loyal to
his engagements. The Thum got sulkier and sulkier, ruder and ruder, until the
Wazir, who was evidently uneasy at the turn things were taking, brought the
discussion to a close with smooth and tactful words. We returned to camp
fairly well satisfied, to find that we had been meant to march that day, but
that with their usual fecklessness the Thum's people had not let us know. It
would have saved me hours of anxiety had I but known this the day before.
After sending off the presents I had brought for
the Thum by the Raja of Astor and my head orderly, Zyarulla Khan, I sat down
and began to write an |223 official letter to
The question I had to solve, and to solve,
pretty quickly, was whether this was a serious outbreak, or a mere childish
fit of vexation. My position was bad: I was in a camp commanded from the
slopes above, as all camps must be in this country; a thousand feet below ran
an impassable torrent, flooded to the full by the melting glaciers; the only
bridge over it was more than a mile from my camp, could be cut in a moment,
and could not possibly be used to remove my men from danger; between me and
our own frontier station lay three marches of the most awful road, not to be
forced by a handful of men, and with a hundred and fifty followers of my own
and the Raja's with me, I had but twenty-one armed men to rely on. I had
Younghusband's passage through the country to arrange for, and to get my
mission across the border in safety. An attack on us, whatever the result,
must bring trouble on the frontier and ruin on my plans. I was in
difficulties, and serious ones, but the trouble had its compensations----it
showed the Thum and his advisers in their true light. It was perfectly plain
that should an attack take place not one of us would get out alive, and that,
whatever loss |225 we might inflict on the enemy, it could hardly affect
the result: a hundred coolies would be sold as slaves in the bazaars of
Turkestan, and the reputation of the Hunza Thum would be enhanced a thousand
times. The day of reckoning would come, but war on the frontier was the one
thing desirable to avoid.
I sent at once for Raja Bahadur Khan of Astor
and Raja Akbar Khan of Punyal, and we discussed the matter. As soon as the
rifle was put right, I sent Bahadur Khan up again with it, to negotiate with
his savage kinsman. The Thum was a connection of his by marriage. The next
few hours were anxious, but gradually, after various pourparlers, peace was
restored. The Wazir came to see me in the afternoon, accompanied by the
Thum's treasurer, an old villain who was the manager in all sales of slaves;
for though the Wazir was his right-hand man, and his brain and hand had
helped him to power, the Chief would not trust him to see me alone. I
gathered enough, however, to show me that Wazir Dadu had been no party to the
day's folly, and that he was for peace and friendliness with us. His
companion made the most of his opportunities by stealing, while my attention
was fixed on Dadu, an enamel matchbox which was on the table. I found that
the man I had |226 to thank for all the trouble was a scoundrel called
Daulat Shah, the son of one of the old Chiefs headmen, who used to go
regularly to
After Dadu had left, I strolled round camp, and
quietly gave orders that none of the fighting men were to leave its
precincts, and that the ammunition boxes were to be opened up the moment it
was dusk.
It was curious to see the different effect which
the knowledge of danger produced on the men in camp. That there was danger
all knew by this time, and each faced it in characteristic style. A Kashmiri
paled to a dirty livid green, and cringed to any Hunza man who came in sight.
The Balti coolies huddled together like a flock of sheep, and stared
wide-eyed towards the Thum's fort, conjuring up visions of slavery. The jolly
face of Raja Akbar Khan of Punyal showed lines of determination, and |227 his few followers, with their loins girt and arms always
in their hands, never left him; my Pathans got more cheerful and cooler every
moment, and busily gave the last finishing touch to the cleaning of their
Martinis. Just after dark, when I had seen the ammunition boxes opened, and
that all was ready, I was informed that men leaving camp had been rudely
stopped, and that we were surrounded by pickets of armed Hunza men. I must
say that this seemed to me the beginning of the end. There was, however,
nothing more to be done, and, striking all tents, except one which I had
promised the Thum, and which I now grudged leaving, we made the best
re-arrangement of our little force possible, had dinner, and went quietly to
bed, prepared for an attack or an early start as the fates might decide.
I was told afterwards that late into the night
our fate had been discussed; the young bloods, like Daulat Shah, urging
instant attack, and expatiating on the easily obtainable loot, the older men
giving wiser counsels, and the weak and cowardly Thum vacillating between the
two parties. Finally prudence prevailed, the Thum retired to sleep, the order
was given that it was to be peace, and the pickets round our camp were
secretly and silently withdrawn. Feeling that something of this sort must be
going on, the night |228 was
one of anxiety, and I was glad at half-past three to get up and to prepare
for our start. We left in about an hour, in as compact a little column as
could be arranged, and it was a great relief to me to find that the head of
it was not checked when we left the polo ground as I had half expected. After
going an hour or so I heard the guns of my salute, and in a few minutes more
Dadu, with a few followers on smoking ponies, galloped up, bringing other
ponies as presents for us to ride. He was very civil as usual to me, and we
parted on the best of terms; but Akbar Khan told me later that he had been
most anxious to find out whether I was going away satisfied or not, had said
that if we were not he would stop us----"was he not the Wazir
Dadu?" This man's action was a great puzzle to me at the time, and I
never quite got to the bottom of it. I doubt if he himself had any very
definite programme, beyond making what he could out of us, and keeping in
with his master.
The march was a very trying one, but luckily we
had cloudy weather. Otherwise, accompanied as we were by laden coolies, whom
we were bound to keep near in order to prevent any being kidnapped, toiling
along the face of bare precipices, which faced due south, and got the full
blaze of the August sun, |229 we should
have suffered considerably. Shortly after our arrival in camp came a letter
from the Thum, saying our early departure had prevented his coming to see us
off, and asking if we were satisfied. This letter was brought by our friend,
Daulat Shah, who was most anxious to find out if we were pleased, and who had
quite changed his tone and manner. It was a volte-face on the part of
the Chief, who was probably now cursing those who had counselled him to
violence, and in whose fickle and unstable mind the advantages of being well
with us were now in the ascendant. My reply to his letter was very much to
the point, and the result was a complete climb-down on the part of the Thum,
abject apologies and profuse protestations of loyalty to the engagements
lately taken. I attached the proper value to his vows, but left the country
feeling that, at all events for that year, there would be no further trouble,
and that Younghusband's safe passage was assured.
We all liked what we saw of the Hunza people;
they were cheery and pleasant and civil as we passed through their villages.
The leaders were scoundrels. Dadu and his son had fired the first shots at
the old Thum, while the contemptible young parricide who succeeded cowered in
a room below them. The moment the old man was dead Safdar Ali entered |230 the fort, seized the wife of one of his father's chief
adherents, and murdered his three younger brothers. Two were strangled and
cut to pieces, the third was taken to the edge of the cliff, on which the
fort stands, and hurled over. He was a mere boy, and only asked that he might
be thrown into the water, not on to the rocks; his prayers were unheeded.
Safdar Ali's description of the circumstances attending his accession was
contained in a letter to Government which ran somewhat as follows: "By
the will of God my father and I fell out; he died suddenly, and I have
ascended the throne." The old Thum, with all his villainy, had been a
man, and I found traces, even during my short visit to Hunza, of deep
discontent with Safdar Ali, whose cruelty was unrelieved by any redeeming
feature. When the end came, three years later, and he fled like the coward he
was without striking a blow, the feelings of the people towards him were well
shown; there was a general sigh of relief throughout the country. Daulat Shah
may have missed him, for when I next visited Hunza, I heard, with some
pardonable satisfaction, that amongst the men carrying stones to build a
block house, my orderlies had recognised our old friend.
The last marches out of Hunza were very severe,
the road even for the Hindu-Kush was bad; it was |231 perpetually crossing parris with frightful drops or very
steep slopes into the river, and it was so narrow that the coolies carrying
loads were in constant danger. Fortunately for us the cloudy weather
continued, and on the last day we had some rain. The views in consequence
were exquisite. All the colouring of the hills, the pale reds and browns and
soft shades of green, which are merged by glaring sunlight into one uniform
grey, now showed out. The view up the Chaprot valley was particularly fine,
heavy clouds lay in a great bar across the mountains, dropping transparent
veils of falling rain, through which range after range showed out with
delicately softened outline. It was a delightful march, none the less so from
my feeling that I had brought my party out of the country safely, and had
been able to avoid any serious trouble. We left Hunza territory at the
Manners-Smith now left me to ride back to Astor
and pay the troops there and at Bunji, and I marched |232 into Gilgit, paying the troops at Nomal en route. I
paid several hundred men with my own hands. Many of them had seen no pay for
two years, but I received few complaints as to the correctness of their
accounts. The Artillery to a man objected to having to pay extra for
greatcoats, in addition to being mulcted for uniform, most of which they had
never received, and I sympathised with them. The whole thing was a delightful
example of red tape administration, the returns of uniform and pay were
accurate and full, the only slight defect being that the uniforms were not
forthcoming, and that the men were never paid. I found several men ill at
Nomal, and not the slightest attempt made to do anything for them. The
General had given orders that no sick men were to be sent into Gilgit, so
that the want of medical arrangements might not be too glaringly apparent.
But he had not counted on the unpleasant English habit of searching personal
inspections. The want of humanity in the treatment of the troops did not
strike the high-caste Hindu. You might not kill a cow in the country, but
thousands of troops might be left to rot in foul barracks, with no medical
arrangements for their care or healing, without a word of protest, or an
attempt at alleviation. Kashmiri mal-administration was maddening, the |233 covert opposition, obstinacy, and callousness of the
officials were disheartening, but I could make allowances for it all, and I
realised that the old bottles of prejudice and ignorance must not be suddenly
and forcibly filled with the new wine of reform, but that patience and
consideration would alone enable me to win the day. |234
CHAPTER
VI
SECOND
VISIT TO CHITRAL
I REMAINED a fortnight in Gilgit, during which
the whole of the troops there were paid by us, and much time was spent with
the
Having roughed out my various plans, and got
things more or less into working order, I started for my second visit to
Chitral in the middle of |236 September, with the intention of returning to Gilgit in a couple of months,
either by Dir Bajour and India, or by the direct route, as circumstances
might permit. Younghusband was to be in Hunza by the middle of November, and
I meant to be in Gilgit at the time in case he wanted help.
The first day brought difficulty. The native
surveyor, a Mahomedan, whom we had brought up from India, and whom I had left
doing some work in Hunza and Nagar, rejoined my camp, and at once came and
proteste'd against going into Kafiristan with Robertson. He threw himself at
my feet and wept, put his turban down before me, the last form of entreaty,
and begged me to kill him there and then but not to force him to enter
Kafiristan. That country, in his opinion, was no place for a lonely
Mahomedan. He vowed that he understood, when the subject was first mooted,
that Robertson was going in with a guard, and with suitable camp
arrangements, and that he dared not go in with him alone. His excuse was
absolutely untrue, as the whole conditions under which Robertson meant to
undertake his exploration had been carefully explained to him when the
question of his going had been originally discussed. The fact was that the
Hunza business had shaken his nerve completely, and that |237 he was quite unfit to go. He was full of gruesome
stories of parties of Hunza men, guns in hand, peeping over each hill he
passed, waiting for the chance of a shot at him, of Nagar treachery, and of a
coming attack on us. I felt that I had no right to force a man into a
dangerous expedition against his will, and I accordingly ordered him back to
There was a further disappointment for us in
this matter. A Christian Scripture reader, belonging to the Peshawar Mission,
Syed Shah by name, who had already penetrated into Kafiristan, and had some
knowledge of the language, was to have accompanied Robertson. But he had not
arrived, and it was evident that Robertson would have to go by himself. After
much consideration we decided that the best thing would be for Robertson to
enter Kafiristan alone at once, remain there a month or so, and return to
On arrival at Gakuch I found letters from the
Mehtar warning me that Raja Akbar Khan of Punyal, in league with the people
of Darel and Tangir, in the
Finally the Mehtar's Agent at Gilgit, who had
preceded me to make arrangements for our march, returned to enquire the
reason of our not following him. He came to see me, full of indignation at
the idea of an attack in the Mehtar's territory being for a moment considered
possible. He loudly averred that the whole story was a lie; I said it might
be so, but when his master himself wrote and warned me, what was I to do. He
was very angry, and said the Mehtar had been deceived, which, considering his
knowledge of the frontier, was hardly likely. Altogether it was rather an
amusing scene, and showed the importance of warning diplomatic agents of an
intended coup.
Next day we started, as I calculated that the
Mehtar's letter in reply should reach me at the first Chitrali fort across
the frontier. We were met by a great deputation of Nizam-ul-Mulk's head men,
amongst whom were many old acquaintances. The marching was now delightful,
the stream a dream of |241 beauty, its banks aglow with autumn colouring, and snow falling nightly on
the hill-tops. At one camp two nobles from Badakshan, refugees from the
Amir's knife, came to see me. The Mehtar had given them asylum, and of course
wished to pass them on to our care. They looked very down and unhappy, and I
was very sorry for them, but beyond giving them some temporary assistance
could do nothing. It was a miserable position for them, wanderers dependent
on the charity of a poor and close-fisted Chief, who naturally did not wish
to have his country turned into a refuge for penniless exiles. The Mehtar was
bound to assist them by the traditions of these wild countries, where a man
never knows what his own fate may be. A ruler must extend such hospitality as
is in his power, so that if it should come to his turn he may receive the
same treatment.
Throughout the march, to keep up the fiction of
danger from the
The night before we marched into Mastuj I
received a letter from
We had the customary reception at Mastuj,
followed next day by a state visit from Afzul-ul-Mulk. It had been raining at
night, and was now bitterly cold, so we paid our return visit, and enjoyed
Afzai's subsequent dinner in the fort. Our Agent in Chitral and Mian Rahat
Shah, the Mehtar's confidant, had |244 met
me a few days before, and I had an opportunity of learning all the changes in
Chitral politics that had taken place during the preceding year. I found that
Afzul-ul-Mulk had made considerable progress, and had detached some of his
brother's most trusted adherents. The proposed return to
Afzul accompanied me on my way to Chitral, and
Nizam-ul-Mulk met me half-way there. The brothers, after the first formal
meeting, carefully kept out of each other's way, their followers glowered at
each other and kept their swords loose in their scabbards. Prince Hal, as we
christened Nizam, was the same as ever, in manner and looks infinitely
superior to his brother; but feckless as to the future, he was busily
throwing away his chances of succession to the throne.
He came to see me after dinner one night and
nearly finished his earthly career. We offered him tea, but he voted for
something stronger, and |245 we
brought out one of our last bottles of champagne. He had never tasted it, and
to my surprise was quite delighted with it. Unfortunately, accustomed though
he had become to spirits, he was not proof against the sparkling wine, and a
couple of glasses got into his head. Towards the end of the interview he
looked extremely handsome, had a good colour, and was just sufficiently
elevated to be on the best of terms with us all, and to enjoy himself
thoroughly, while at the same time he knew perfectly well what he wanted to
say, and said it in the confidential, good-humoured drunken man's way. But
the return to his own tents was the serious thing; he did not mind his own
men seeing him happy, but did not like Afzul's doing so, and he sat on till
near midnight. Then, with protestations of eternal friendship and
appreciative remarks as to the efficacy of the Dagonet, he wandered solemnly
off, one arm round our Agent's neck, the other round his foster-brother's.
Poor Prince Hal, I was always sorry for him; it
was so evident that he was playing a losing game and did not realise it, and
if to his other vices he was going to add drink, it did not require a prophet
to foresee the end. Afzul's private interview followed next evening, and I
heard before he |246 came that the little
savage had been furious at his brother's visit the night before. He persuaded
himself that I was promising to recognise his brother on the part of
Government as the heir, and only the strongest dissuasion on the part of his
principal adherents prevented his attacking and murdering Nizam as he passed
from my tents to his own. We should have been in a pleasant predicament had
he done so. After our interview we went and sat round a camp fire and watched
Afzul's boys, and afterwards our Balti coolies, dancing. The latter were most
grotesque and uncouth in their movements. The entertainment was diversified
by a well-acted pantomime, representing the attack and murder of a party of
Pathans by Kafirs, the comic element being supplied by the Pathan's servant,
who was kicked by all his masters.
We were much amused one day at our old native
doctor, whom we were taking up to establish the Chitral dispensary. The road
ran for a mile or more along the face of a conglomerate cliff, about sixty
feet above the river. It had been much improved, and was six feet wide. We
had swung along this at a canter, and turned a sharp corner where the path
ran into a side ravine and was steep and narrow. I was leading, and just had
time to pull up to prevent |247 riding over the native doctor, who, on all fours, and with a huge blinker of
thick paper fixed to the side of his head to prevent his seeing the precipice,
was crawling up what he considered the most dangerous piece on his hands and
knees. The poor old gentleman never got accustomed to the cliffs, always
vowed that he would return to
The Mehtar met me some miles from Chitral, as he
had done beforehand, coming officially as we were, we of course got into
uniform. The show was not so fine as the year before, as one of his grandsons
was dead, and he had sent a lot of men down the valley to the obsequies. Moreover,
he informed me that he had hundreds of men watching the passes into his
country. This I knew was untrue, but it was said to emphasise the need of
assistance from Government on his part, and the danger of his position from
the Amir and others. The reception does not need describing. A Janáli was
improvised on our way in, so that we were saved an extra three-mile ride to
the polo ground and back; the guns thundered from the fort, and we were
escorted by the Mehtar, surrounded by a brilliant crowd of retainers, to our
quiet camp in the well-remembered orchard. The day was hot and the dust
blinding, and we were delighted when the |248 old
Chief, with his tactful courtesy, having seen us home, left us in peace.
Next morning the Mehtar came with a legion of
sons, and we received him in uniform, and with a guard-of-honour. He at once
began talking business, but as I did not want to discuss my instructions coram
populo, I turned the conversation first on to Robertson going to
Kafiristan, to which he at once assented, and then to the establishment of
the dispensary. The native doctor was summoned, and was presented to the
Mehtar. I put his hand into the old Chiefs, and entrusted him to his care. As
usual the Mehtar's manners were perfect, and he promised to take every care
of him, a promise he loyally fulfilled. We then cleared the tent, and
proceeded to business, which was concluded in this and following interviews
fully to the satisfaction of both sides. The interview closed" by my
saying that I hoped this would be always remembered as an auspicious day. By
the old Mehtar I am glad to think it was, but the seeds of strife sown in his
day were even then germinating, and the little kingdom was to reel through a
period of battle, murder, and sudden death; the princes, their hands red with
brothers' blood, were to go down in rapid succession into the grave, and of
all the sons I saw that day but one, then a child of seven, was to weather
the storm. |249
As soon as the Mehtar had departed, Robertson
interviewed his Kafirs, and brought them to me to be given presents. This was
his way of impressing upon them that he was merely entering their country as
a doctor and friend, empty handed, and that if any one gave presents it was
not he. They were a fine representative set of savages who had come to escort
him into Kafiristan, and to make as much out of the transaction as possible.
The chief among them were Turg Murg, a very grave, handsome old man, Diwan
Malik, a shrewd, more pleasant-looking elder, and a wild-looking priest. The
old men were rather absurd to look upon, as their beards were dyed, and for
about an inch from the roots the hair was bright violet, shading from there
gradually down to black. They all carried walking-sticks, Turg Murg's being
ornamented with a small brass bell, in token of his having killed over a
hundred men. One's disgust at these murderous savages increased when the fact
was realised that women and children, even babies at the breast, were
indiscriminately murdered to make up the tale of killings.
The assembled elders promised to look after
Robertson in every possible way, and to let him come and go in Kafiristan as
he liked. After some talk, during which the frogs of my uniform were |250 handled in a way which showed how maddening our new friends
would be to live among, owing to their inquisitiveness, I took the Kafirs off
to give them their presents. Turg Murg declined to receive his, and asked for
money and breech-loading guns, which I promptly refused to give him. The
others took theirs, some, of course, wanting more. It was a mistake my giving
them their presents in person----it would have been wiser to send them out to
them by an orderly ----but I was anxious to help Robertson in every way, and
we neither of us saw the mistake till too late.
An extract from my diary sums up the Kafiristan
question pretty fairly as it looked then:----"The episode showed the
difficulty of dealing with these savages. They claim to be of the same stock
as we are, and profess to be delighted to see us, but the moment they are
given anything the trouble begins. Every one wants the same present as his
neighbour, or something a little better. One cause of the failure of previous
attempts to penetrate into the country was undoubtedly the present
difficulty, and the hideous jealousies raised amongst the Kafirs by it
Robertson's is the only plan, to go in as a doctor, prepared to rough it,
with no presents. What will be the end is curious to speculate on. The Amir
is evidently anxious to conquer the country; the Mehtar has |251 brought a certain part of it under his sway; the Pathans
across the mountains in Bajour all want to wipe the Kafirs out. The end will
probably be gradual annexation, incorporation in the neighbouring states, and
Mahomedanism. It seems now that they are too divided amongst themselves to
become a people, and with a well-armed girdle being drawn tighter and tighter
round them, conquest can but be a matter of years."
Personally I did not expect the denouement to
come so soon as it did, but I cannot say I was sorry when it did come. The
only real cause of sorrow, when the Amir conquered the country, lay in the
unscientific character of his methods, which destroyed the possibility of
fully studying the Kafirs before their conversion to Mahomedanism. Many most
interesting questions of race, of language, and of religion must go
unstudied, not the least fascinating being the suggested connection being
their religious songs and those used by the Greeks in the worship of Bacchus.
This connection was, I think, first pointed out by Colonel Sir T. Holdich,
R.E., who has localised close by in Swat, a country which must have been
Kafir, both Nysa, the city of Bacchus, and Mount Meros.2 From the archaeological point of |252 view, the fact that a fanatical Mahomedan soldiery has
swept over Kafiristan, and subdued it, gives much cause for grief. But the
sentimentalism which in the Kafir saw the noble savage stretching out his
arms to welcome his brother Aryan, the Englishman, prepared to receive his
religion, and to form, under his guidance, a homogeneous power, ready and
willing to fall into line with our armies in the defence of the empire, was
born of ignorance. The Kafir was a savage, pure and simple; every valley was
held by a different clan, each alike ready to fly at its neighbour's throat,
and to call in the nearest Mahomedan power to subjugate its enemy. They were
a murderous set of brutes, who were a curse to their Mahomedan neighbours.
The latter had, after all, just as much right to live as the Kafir, and a
perfect right to conquer them if they could, in order to put a stop to their
incessant frontier raids. I never understood the attitude taken up by some
eminently enlightened people in
We stayed some time in Chitral, and I saw a good
deal of the Mehtar, and again was much taken with him. He must have been a
strikingly handsome man in his youth; even now it was a very fine face, stern
and bold, but with a charming expression when he smiled. He was in high good
humour during my visits, and we used to go to the Janáli together and watch
the polo. He wanted to play the first day, but I dissuaded him, not desiring
to be present in Chitral during the inevitable free fight which must follow his
death. When we got off our horses at the side of the ground there was but one
chair, on which of course neither of us would sit, so we stood talking while
another was being brought. Something I said pleased the old man so much that
he turned and hugged me, and stood with his arm round my neck for some
moments. It showed how pleased he was, and was satisfactory from that point
of view, but it was a dreadful ordeal from another----for the Chitrali
gentleman does not wash too much, and his clothes swarm with vermin. After an
interview in one of their houses it was always a case of a complete change,
all one's under-linen going into boiling water |254 and outer-garments being put into the sun and searched.
It is a sickening experience for the Englishman.
All the time I was in Chitral I was waiting for
the promised instructions as to my dealings with Umra Khan. They never came,
my brother's illness having caused the question to be hung up, but I expected
them every post, and awaited their arrival eagerly. I spent my time seeing
all the leading men, amongst others whom I interviewed with much interest
being Humayun, the refugee Wazir from Hunza. He gave me a good deal of
information about Hunza, mostly erroneous, and calculated to show that he,
and not |255 his brother Dadu, was the, man to make friends with. But
much that he said was of value, and I knew enough of the effect of exile to
sift the false from the true. He had a very strong party on his side, that I
knew, but I could not fall in with his suggestion that he should compass the
murder of the Thum. This man was, I think, after the Mehtar, by far the
cleverest native gentleman I met in the Hindu-Kush. In some ways I think he
was superior to the Mehtar; he seemed to take a more extended view of
questions affecting the welfare of the frontier states. He belonged to a
younger generation, and may have imbibed some knowledge of the power of the
Indian Empire from men who had travelled, but that could not quite explain
the difference. His appreciation of the value and power of outside states
seemed to me to be almost intuitive. He had never read a book; he read men
instead. He was a born diplomat, courteous, polished, and pleasant, a man who
could make up his mind rapidly and act decisively, and to a winning charm of
manner he added a great personal reputation for courage. He longed to have an
opportunity of revenging his old master's death, and of repaying the
indignities he had been put to, on the heads of Safdar Ali Khan and his own
murderous brother Dadu. |256
Nizam-ul-Mulk came to dinner with me one night
accompanied by a Kashmiri officer. Nizam regretted the absence of champagne,
but I was adamant; it would never have done to have had here in Chitral a
repetition of the former scene. It was curious to see how easily these native
gentlemen, who had never dined in the European fashion, adapted themselves in
their new surroundings. Nizam's sole lapse from the customary manners of the
dinner table was when he blew his nose on his table napkin. Otherwise the
dinner was a complete success, and my cook, the best camp cook I ever had,
surpassed himself. Nizam's enjoyment of foreign cookery surprised me, but
everything appealed to him from a hors d'oeuvre of anchovy to the
final strawberry ice. At last, after many days of anxious waiting, came a
letter from Umra Khan, the upshot of which was that, unless I could make
definite terms with him on the part of Government, there was no use in my
coming to Jandol. Unfortunately no instructions had reached me, so there was
an end of the matter. I have often wondered what effect my going with full
powers to treat might have had. The Napoleon of Bajour was a gentleman, as
was shown by the treatment of two British officers who fell into his hands
during the Chitral campaign. He was perfectly |257 straightforward in his dealings with me; He pointed out
that he had for the moment conquered his enemies, but that they were still on
the watch in a ring round him, ready to take advantage of any slip. Could he
be certain of the support of Government he avowed himself ready to throw in
his lot with us, and he was then the most powerful factor in Swat and Baj our
politics: Had I been empowered to go down, and to make definite terms with
him, it is possible that the troubles of a few years later might have been
avoided, but it would have been difficult to arrive at an agreement
satisfactory to both sides. Umra Khan's was a personal rule, born of war. His
demands might have been prohibitive, and would most likely have included the
payment of a subsidy which it might have been advisable to grant, and the
presentation of a number of rifles which it might not have been wise to give:
Had we been able to establish a powerful and friendly Chief, ruling the
country from the Swat river to the borders of Chitral, the peace of that
portion of the frontier would have been assured, and the question of opening
the road between Chitral and India would have been solved for the time, but
there would always have been the risk of chaos in the event of his death.
This is the ever-present difficulty in dealing with frontier states. You can
scarcely ever count |258 with
certainty as to the succession. You may sometimes strengthen a vigorous ruler
with advantage; to bolster up a weak one is, in the end, almost always
useless.
The visit to Dir hinged on that to Bajour, and
both now had to be abandoned. Preparations were at once made for the return
march to Gilgit. Several posts reached me during my last few days in Chitral,
and some had been tampered with and parcels stolen. I reported the matter to
the Mehtar, who was furious, and who caused instant enquiries to be made, and
a man sent for from each of the houses which had furnished the runners. The
culprits were tracked, and the Mehtar proceeded to order condign punishment.
The men were to be sold into slavery, but escaped at my intercession. The old
Chief said it was no use he knew to offer me the wives and children of the
robbers, but that he thought my Pathans would appreciate the gift. I had much
difficulty in persuading him to leave the unfortunates in peace. But if no
one suffered very severe pains and penalties, the fuss made had the desired
result, and our posts were sacred for the future.
My last days in Chitral were full of business,
and the evenings were spent as usual round a camp fire watching the dancing,
and listening to the boys singing. Three Kafirs joined the circle one night,
one of |259 them having the most revolting type of face I ever saw,
and danced badly for some time. Nizam then asked them for the chaunt which is
sung when a successful raiding party arrives near its own village. They
refused to sing it unless a goat was given them to eat, so one was brought
and presented to them. To my disgust one of them rushed at it, knocked it
down with a tremendous blow of his fist, and a second dashed in with his
dagger. It was done like lightning. I saw his hand clutch the hilt, and the
next moment the dagger crashed through the poor creature's ribs. It was a
most disgusting exhibition, and one we had hot bargained for, merely the pure
savage devilry and love of killing coming out. The goat was removed at once,
and the Kafirs came into the ring and sang two or three times over the same
few bars; the air had a very weird refrain, a sudden rise and fall in the
cadence. One could well understand the effect being most telling if the song
broke out suddenly in the silence of the night near some sleeping village,
and roused its savage inhabitants with the glad tidings of successful raid
and murder. The Kafirs had so disgusted me with their cruelty in killing the
goat, and looked such low brutes, that I was glad when they went, and we
returned to the "legitimate drama," our dances and |260 singing boys. Nizam promised me a glorious reception if
I would come to Yasin and visit him next year. We were to have the band and
dancing boys all night, and not one of them twice over. It was a terrible
prospect, and I should have had to go through with it, for I meant to make
friends with my host, but the visit never came off.
The last day was spent in farewell visits, in
sending the Mehtar and his ladies their presents, arid in distributing
rewards to my various friends. The Mehtar accompanied me for a couple of
miles when I left Chitral, and after giving me some really sensible advice
against wandering about my own kingdom without escorts, parted with me for
the last time. I never saw him again, though we had three years more to work
together in, and whatever snares he laid for me, however much he plotted to
my annoyance and sometimes to my anger, my personal friendship and admiration
for the old man never changed. Considering his surroundings he was a great
man. He was a typical border chief of the old school; for him and his
brothers the question had been whether to kill or to be killed. He had chosen
the former, and had carried out his plans with unwavering determination,
backed by the coolest calculation and the most ruthless execution. |261
The lines from Sir Alfred Lyall's well-known
poem, "The Amir's Soliloquy," used to ring in my head as I sat
looking at the old man's striking face:----
"The virtues of God are pardon and pity,
they never were mine; The brothers who opposed him slept where they
had embraced, and his red sword was sheathed. He ruled over a united country,
and no man might gainsay him.
My return journey was uneventful. Afzul-ul-Mulk
entertained me at Mastuj. We crossed the Shandur ahead of a heavy snowstorm
which overtook us next day, but nothing of importance happened. I received en
route a letter from Younghusband, forwarded by the Hunza Chief, saying
that the latter was on his best behaviour, and was making all necessary
preparations to speed him through his territory. This was so far.
satisfactory that it showed that the Thum for the present meant to abide by
his engagements.
And so we passed out of Chitral territory, and
left "the land of mirth and murder," as we named |262 it in opposition to "the land of gold and
apricots." I was not to see its capital again until my old friends had
all gone. The Mehtar was the only one to die in peace and the fulness of
years; six of his sons lie in bloody shrouds.
At Gakuch, Syed Shah, the Scripture reader from
Peshawar Mission, met me, too late to accompany Robertson into Kafiristan. As
it turned out this was probably for the best. He gave a harrowing description
of the slave trade in Chitral, and told how women were torn from their
husbands and children to be given to other men, families broken up, the boys
and girls sent as presents to
Four days' halt at Gakuch rested the camp, and,
knowing that accumulations of work were piling up for me at Gilgit, I pushed
on, and regained the shelter of my house by the middle of November, well
pleased with the results of my long tour. We |263 had been marching steadily for four months and a half
from the time we left Kashmir, and had covered nearly a thousand miles.
In a few days Robertson passed through on his
way to
2. * Journal,
Geographical Society, January 1896.
CHAPTER
VII
DARDISTAN
THE limits of the Gilgit Agency correspond
roughly with the region to which has been given the name of Dardistan. The
name Dardistan, or country of the Dards, is misleading, for there is no race
to which the title of Dard can fairly be given, no country so called by its
inhabitants. However, such as it is, the name is a convenient one, and has
been adopted, if not invented, by the scientific. Dardistan comprises the
whole of Chitral, Yasin, Punyal, the Gilgit valley, Hunza and Nagar, the
Astor valley, the Indus valley from Bunji to Batera, the Kohistan-i-Malazai,
that is the upper reaches of the Panjkora river, and the Kohistan of Swat
Kohistan means the country of the hills, and corresponds to our word
Highlands. The section of the Indus valley included in the above is again
divided into two main portions, the upper containing the Shin republics of
Gor, Chilas, Darel, Tangir, called Shinaka or Shinkari, and the lower generally
known as |265 Kohistan. It is in this lower portion alone, from the
Kandia river to Batera, that the inhabitants of the right bank of the Indus
are said to use the word Dard, and they apply it to the dwellers on the left
bank. Throughout the rest of the country inhabited by the Dard races, a block
roughly two hundred and fifty miles from east to west, and a hundred and
fifty from north to south, the name is, to the best of my belief, entirely
unknown. It is a name found in the ancient geographers, both Pliny and
Ptolemy use it, but it is very difficult to define exactly the limits
occupied by the tribes to whom the name was applied. It is perhaps safe to
conclude that the whole of the mountainous portion of the Indus valley from
the plains of
Who the Dards were originally is a most puzzling
question, and one for the trained ethnologist and philologist rather than for
the plain soldier. However, following Leitner, Drew, and Biddulph,3 who made a special study of the
question, it is possible to arrive at certain broad principles, which is all |266 that the general reader requires. The Dard races may be
put down as largely Aryan, and the position now held by the different classes
and languages points unerringly to waves of conquest. The mass of the
population of Chitral are the Kho, speaking Khowar, and they probably
represent the earliest wave of invasion which swept into Chitral from the
north over the passes of the Hindu-Kush. So remote is their antiquity that
they may fairly be Considered aboriginal. They owned the whole of the country
of Chitral, but were dispossessed by the Ronus, the most honoured caste
amongst the Dards, and by various other privileged classes, among whom are
certainly the offshoots of families from Badakshan, who followed the fortunes
of the founder of the present ruling dynasty. These upper classes have
absorbed all the power, and treat the Kho with contempt, calling them
"Fakir Mdshkin," which one might translate les misérables. The
despised aborigines, however, have imposed their language on their superiors,
and are interesting from the fact that they have no castes. This, I think,
conclusively shows that they belong to the earliest Aryan race, and broke off
from it before the acquisition of Hinduism; for in all other cases the
Dard proper is emphatically a man with a caste. |267 The principal caste is that of the Ronus, a small body
held in the highest respect, always ranking next to royalty, and from whom
the Wazirs are as a rule taken. Then come the Shins, below whom are the
Yeshkuns, and lastly a collection of low castes, Krámins, Doms, etc., the
millers, potters, and musicians of the community. There is one plainly marked
rule about the three leading castes; they give their daughters in marriage to
the caste above, never to the caste below. The Ronus give their daughters in
marriage to the ruling families, and in return receive the illegitimate
daughters of princes, but not a daughter born in wedlock. The Shins give
their daughters to Ronus, the Yeshkun to Shins, but a lawful daughter is
never given to a man of the lower caste.
It would seem from a study of the map, and of the
proportions in which the main castes occupy the country, that the later waves
of Dard invasion rolled in succession up the Indus valley from the plains of
the Punjab, penetrating into the side valleys as the tide rose, and either
completely submerging the aborigines, or else driving them and the wrecks of
previous waves into the inmost recesses of the hills. The first of these
waves must have been Yeshkun, the second Shin. There are no less than eleven |268 different languages and dialects spoken in Dardistan,
and their distribution confirms the above view. Putting aside eight of the
dialects, and taking the northern half of the country under discussion, you
find Khowar generally spoken in Chitral; Burishki, the language of the
Yeshkuns, spoken in the inaccessible Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin valleys; Shina,
the language of the Shins, in the Gilgit, Astor, Punyal, and Ghizr valleys.
Roughly speaking, the proportion of Shins to the whole population falls from
ninety-five per cent, at Koli, in the
Buddhism must have flourished now, as the
countless "mannis," or long stone altars, which abound throughout
the Hindu-Kush show. The topes, chortens, and sculptured Buddhas scattered
about in Chitral, Punyal, Gilgit, Nagar, and Baltistan, also testify to the
spread of the gentle faith, and the voice of history in the writings of the
Chinese pilgrims is not silent. With the Buddhist |270 era came a proficiency in the arts never since equalled,
as is shown by the masonry, sculpture, and clean-cut sockets to support the
timbers of wooden irrigation channels taken across perpendicular cliffs near
Gilgit. After an interval of some centuries, but how soon seems impossible to
decide, followed the Shins. That the Shin race was Hindu there can be no
reasonable doubt; this is shown by their peculiar regard for the cow, their
strict regard for caste, and the absence of the slightest feeling of
reverence for the Buddhist remains abounding within their limits. Biddulph places
their last home before the final move at Pukli, the modern Hazara district, a
corner between Kashmir, the Indus, and the plains of the Punjab, and thinks
that they swept up the
The smaller broken Dard tribes, living for the
most part in the southern portion of Dardistan, it is unnecessary to mention
in detail. Biddulph |271 considers that they fled from the increasing pressure of the Afghans in the
sixteenth or seventeenth century. Like a shoal of small fish when attacked by
a pike, they seem to have broken up and scattered in all directions, never to
reunite. The Gaware of the
Conjectures have been hazarded that to the
northern half of Dardistan applied the name of Bolor, the country mentioned by
Marco Polo immediately after his description of the Pamirs. Colonel Yule
disagreed with the view, and placed Bolor north-west of the Pamirs, and in a
note quotes Colonel Alexander Gardner's testimony in confirmation. In one of
the final notes on Marco Polo, however, Colonel Yule leans to the opinion
first held by Forsyth that the word Bolor is merely a corruption of the
Persian "bálá," high. This |272 seems extremely probable, for to the European ear the broad pronunciation of
the "a," which is turned into "aw," verges very closely
on "or." This would explain the great difficulty in fixing on the
actual position of Bolor, for the term may well have been applied to the
highlands surrounding the Bám-i-Dunya, or roof of the world, as the Pamirs
are called in Central Asia, Bilauristan, the name given in a
seventeenth-century Pushtu poem, as Yule points out, to the mountainous
country north of Swat, on this supposition, merely means the same thing as
Kohistan, the highlands. A similar use of the corresponding word occurs in
Chitrali, where one of the main valleys is called Turikho in the higher half,
Murikho in the lower, the literal meaning being "the upper valley"
and "the lower valley." "Bálá" and "páin," high
and low, are words constantly used by all the Persian-speaking people in the
Hindu-Kush for describing ground, and travellers have very likely hundreds of
times, on asking the name of lines of mountains, merely received the word
"bálá," for with one or two very rare exceptions, mountains, and certainly
mountain ranges, are never named in this part of the world. In this way one
can understand the adjective passing into a name. At the same time it is
difficult to |273 account for a man like Gardner, who, living as he did as
a native among natives, must have talked Persian perfectly, being taken in in
this way, and it seems not unlikely that the word "Bolor" may be
the corruption of "bálá," picked up by the non-Persian-speaking
population from their Persian-speaking superiors, and applied to definite
tracks of country north of the Hindu-Kush. The corrupted word might well,
under these circumstances, have come into general use among all classes to
express the highlands, which would explain its use by Marco Polo and later
travellers. Personally, I never heard the word "Bolor" applied to
any tract of country, but I never crossed the Hindu-Kush, and to a region
north of Hindu-Kush alone was the name applied by Marco Polo and Gardner.
My time at Gilgit was too much occupied by my
multifarious duties to enable me to study the race and language questions,
but I was naturally constantly in contact with the people, and gained a very
fair knowledge of their peculiarities. There is no doubt that the Shins are a
dying race: in Chilas their numbers have dropped with dreadful rapidity
during the last few years; it is the same lower down the Indus valley, and in
Gilgit they are being gradually supplanted by immigrants. They |274 are unenterprising, wanting in stamina and in
perseverance. They are men of fine enough physique, but they are soft, and
have little or no warlike instinct. Very much attached to their lands, they
will not move except under official pressure or the compulsion of the direst
poverty. Half a dozen able-bodied men of one family prefer starving on a tiny
piece of ancestral land to dividing their forces and taking up ample grants,
distant perhaps but a few miles from their old home. The systematic
oppression of their rulers, which deprived a man of much of the fruit of his
labours, accounts in part for their attitude on this particular point, but,
allowing for this, the race is sadly wanting in initiative. The Yeshkun is, I
am inclined to think, a better man than the Shin, there is no doubt about his
being a better fighting man, and the small caste or clan of the Ronu is the
best of all. Taking the whole of Dardistan the inhabitants are not warlike,
and in the southern portion alone, which is under the religious influence of
the Mullahs of Swat, do you find fanaticism. The people are peaceful; there
is none of the natural devilry, dash, love of war, and enterprise, which you
find in the neighbouring Pathan, and they never have stood up, and never
would stand up, against severe losses. |275 But
that they could fight behind suitable defences I always felt was pretty
certain, and we found this at Nilt. Centuries of desultory warfare have made
them adepts at the art of field fortification, and awkward customers to deal
with when on the defensive. In attack they are contemptible, and only
dangerous when overwhelming numbers force disciplined troops on to the
defensive, as at Chitral. Even then they would never push an attack home, it
is always an affair of a ring of stone breastworks drawn tighter and tighter
round the invested body, of incessant fire and perhaps mining, never of a
stern open assault such as Pathans would deliver. From the soldier's point of
view they are certainly not first-class fighting men. Their rulers alone are
blood-thirsty, and that really from the accident of birth and of religion.
Even among them, though you might find instances of ruthless severity such as
must accompany succession in a Mahomedan state, you but very rarely found the
cruelty of the savage who delights in the torture of his victim. It was
generally a case of a short sharp shrift. Among the people murders are very
rare, and are almost invariably the result of a slip on the part of a lady.
By their own laws the resulting punishment, if inflicted under certain
circumstances, is |276 perfectly lawful, so
that it can scarcely be called murder.
The great difference between the Dard and the
Pathan cannot be better illustrated than by the condition of Hunza and Nagar
after our fighting there in the year 1891. Within a day of the last fight
which decided the short campaign, officers could and did traverse the country
unarmed: Conway's mountaineering party wandered all over it six months later
without the semblance of an escort, and not one single shot was fired at us
after the power of the tribesmen had been broken. They "took their licking,"
and bore no malice, and within a year, from the very men who had fought
against us, I had organised local levies who were ready to fight on our side,
who turned out without hesitation when called on, and who did excellent work.
Had the country been held by Pathans a small force could never have done what
ours did, we should have lost dozens of officers and men on the line of
communication, and the real trouble would have begun when the final
successful action gave us access to the heart of their country. The
characteristics of the two races could not be more dissimilar.
An incidental proof, if one were needed, of the
connection of the Dards with an Aryan race is to be |277 found in the ornaments worn by men and women. These are
of gold, silver, or brass, many being of rather debased design, overloaded
with filigree detail. But some of the designs are remarkable and interesting.
The brooches worn by all classes are discs of metal with a large hole in the
centre crossed by a pin, and are identical in design with the fibulae so
common in
3. * Leitner:
"Dardistan." CHAPTER
VIII
FOLK-LORE
AND SPORT
THE folk-lore and the festivals are most
interesting, but for want of time I could not follow up the researches I
should have loved to make. Vestiges of dead faiths meet you at every turn.
Fires blaze at certain seasons on the hill-sides and on the mountain top, and
remind you that what we call fire-worship originated but a stone's-throw to
the north on the other side of the Hindu-Kush. The cedar, sacred in
Kafiristan, and still exported to India for Hindu ceremonials, is sacred
here; outside every village almost is a stone altar yet visited by the women,
the names of the village gods are remembered, often surreptitiously invoked,
and soothsayers and witchcraft abound. Some little distance up the Chaprot
nulla is a clear spring of water, and if a piece of cowskin is thrown into
this, by order of the Thum of Hunza, to the accompaniment of suitable
incantations, the heavens are immediately obscured with clouds, and the most
dreadful storms rage over the |279 district, to the terror and danger of the obnoxious wayfarer or invader. I
was solemnly warned on more than one occasion against this particular power
for evil possessed by the Hunza Chief. The power was not confined to him, and
seemingly in some cases lay more in the spring than in the person, for I
heard of various other springs in different places, the throwing into which
of any defiling substance was followed by bad weather. It is curious here to
see the cowskin considered an impurity, and it shows the connection with
Hinduism. Sacred as the cow is, no high-caste Hindu will touch cow leather.
The regard for the cow amongst the Shins is most marked, but I think that in
the main valleys, where there is now considerable communication with the
outer world, it is losing its hold. It has gained for the Shins the name of
Dangarik, or the cow people. The Shin used to have some one of another caste
to tend his cows, and nothing would induce him to touch a new-born calf. If
there was no one else handy, and it was necessary to put the calf to the
mother, the little creature's head would be caught at the end of a cleft
stick, and pushed to the udder. The Shin hatred of hens was another distinct
link with Hinduism.
The feasts, many of which must be of Hindu
rather than Buddhist origin, are beginning to fall into |280 desuetude; Mahomedanism is gradually pushing them out,
but they, and the observances which accompanied them, are still to be seen in
some parts. I have assisted more than once at the "Chili" festival,
which marks the commencement of wheat-sowing, and which had years ago a
further connection with the worship of the cedar, now in the main dropped.
What the connection was I failed to find out, most probably the dates of the
aboriginal feast of "Chili" or cedar worship, and of the Shin feast
of sowing synchronised, and the two thus became welded together. The
connection now is limited to a certain amount of wheat being smoked over a
cedar wood fire, and of cedar twigs being in use next day when the sowing
takes
There are many other festivals, almost all connected
with agriculture; spring-time and harvest, autumn and winter, are all marked
by appropriate feasts. The Yudeni drum, or fairy's drum, which was kept on
the top of every
I had ridden up the Bagrot valley, down which a
stream from the southern glaciers of Rakapushi reaches the Gilgit river, in
order to see what could be done to improve the water channels, which were
carried along very difficult cliffs, and which the people only kept in even
partial repair with the greatest labour. It was a melancholy ride. The valley
had been raided years ago by the Yasin ruler, and some two-thirds of the
population carried off into slavery or killed, and the traces of the tragedy
were recognisable on all sides. At the mouth of the Bagrot valley lay
hundreds of acres of land gone out of cultivation, the terraced fields and
the raised irrigation channels still intact, their lichen-grown and sunburnt
stones showing that water had not run over them for decades. Further up the
valley half, and sometimes two-thirds, of the village land lay in the same
state, the dead and gone vineyards easily recognisable by the small stone
vats, which had once run full of foaming must; the flat stones above them, on
which the grapes had been trodden out, and the little stone runnels, through
which the juice had poured, were still in their places.
For several miles the road runs up the narrow
gulley between what was a lateral moraine and the |283 hillside, not a drop of water is passed, not a tree or
glimpse of vegetation is to be seen, not a sound is heard save the ring of
one's horse's hoofs on the burning rock, for the stream frets a thousand feet
below; not a sign of life is there, but perhaps the passing shadow of an
eagle. I had been riding slowly on, lost in a reverie, my horse picking his
own way, when there came a sudden change. There was a sharp turn in the path
which led into a deep ravine cut by a side stream, and then rose in sharp zigzags
to gain the crest of the opposite bank. The moment I turned the corner a shot
rang out, the edge of the cliff "sprung to life with armed men,"
and a rapid feu de joie rippled along the crest above me. Arrived at
the top I was met by the village elders, was incensed with the smoke from a
platter of burning cedar twigs, and presented with a flat unleavened cake
soaked in clarified butter, the local variant for bread and salt. As I broke
a piece and ate it, I noticed that the bread itself was apparently consecrated,
sprays of the sacred cedar lying on the dish on which it was carried. I spent
some days making friends with the people, and visiting every yard of their
watercourses, which were, as usual, a monument of patient skill. To carry
water channels across the face of perpendicular |284 conglomerate cliffs cut out of moraines by the action of
a stream which rages below, sometimes impinging on one bank, sometimes on the
other, is no easy matter even for that most handy of creatures, the Royal
Engineer, however well he may be equipped. For the poor villager it is a
labour of Sisyphus. The stream is always cutting away a frail prop,
undermining a high retaining wall, breaking the side of the water channel, or
washing away the intake headworks, and the work has to be done all over
again. Truly, the people compelled one's admiration by their steadfast
patience and determination, and filled one with a desire to help them in
every way in their desperate fight with nature.
As I passed through a stretch of abandoned
cultivation given up to the barberry, the wild pomegranate, and the brier
rose, we stumbled on a time-worn altar, the stones of which attested its
great age. It was covered with a few cedar boughs, others lay scattered
around as the wind had displaced them, and the men with me said it was the
shrine of the village god, and that these were the offerings of women who had
come to pray. It was a scene which made a vivid impression on me. Far away
above us, the culminating point of the valley, rose a snow peak against a
bright blue sky, open hillsides fell back on |285 each hand, swept by a fresh spring wind, patches of
bright cultivation lay across the stream whose voice rose from the gorge to
our left, but no house marred the view. Before us, backed by the silent
terraced fields of a dead generation, lay the little altar of a dead faith.
And yet one felt it was not dead; the great god Pan laid his hand upon one's
heart, all nature was filled by his presence, and one felt the impulse which
brought the women there to offer their humble sacrifice to the living god of
the stream and the hillside rather than turn to the cold deity of
Mahomedanism, so essentially the god for men, and not for women. I replaced
the scattered boughs, and invoked peace and prosperity on the stricken
valley.
Above the village where we were camped was a
conical hill inhabited by the local fairies. It is easy to realise how
certain their existence is to the people. It always seems to me that it is
only in the heart of the great mountains, thousands of feet above the last
trace of human habitation, when you lie by some time-worn rock, lulled by a
silence which can be felt, and gazing at the eternal snows, that the real
voice of Nature speaks to you. Then truly do the heavens declare the glory of
God; you feel the pulse of the All-pervading Presence, the beauty and
sublimity of |286 Nature sink into your soul, and for the moment the
mysterious veil which falls between us and the light wavers and half fades
away. If Nature so speaks to us what must she say to men and children who
spend days and weeks of absolute solitude on the mountain sides? A simple
mountain people must have a simple faith, must bow to visible and tangible
deities, not to abstract objects of pious belief. It needs the pure clear
skies of the desert to produce a race which can recognise that "there is
no god but God," centuries of high civilisation working on the acute and
introspective Indo-Aryan mind are required to produce the Buddha. The gods of
the valley and the mountain, of the mist and forest, the dwellers in the
glacier and the torrent, are the natural first step in worship and in the
supernatural. They are born of the solitary watching of the wandering flock
in the day-time, of the sheepfold at night. The supernatural is ever with the
lonely shepherd; the avalanche sweeping down the mountain side is the protest
of the solitary god against any attempt to scale the approaches to his
throne; the mountain sickness which seizes the wayfarer on some pass is the
vengeance of the disturbed fairies; the shriek of the wind behind the veil of
mist attests their presence; the snow flag streaming from some great peak |287 is a sign of the god's abode; the voice of the gods
speaks in the moaning forest and the rushing waterfall. The fairy and the god
seem at first to trench on each other's domains, and the distinct separation
between them is a thing of later growth. At least so it seemed to me was the
case in the Hindu-Kush.
The last day before I left the valley I saw the
Dainyal. We were taken to the village dancing ground, round which sat all the
men of the village, and were accommodated in the verandah of the guest house,
from which an excellent view of the scene was obtained. A few old women and
children were seated in an outer ring, but all the young women, dressed in
their smartest clothes, were collected in the surrounding houses. The
inevitable band formed part of the inmost ring. After a short interval of
waiting the Dainyal stepped into the circle and sat down. She was at once
covered with a woollen choga, and a platter of burning cedar-twigs was placed
before her, over which she bent, inhaling the smoke. After a few minutes she
rose, and stood facing the orchestra, leaning her hand upon a drum.
Bare-headed, her long black hair streaming down her back, she stood swaying
slowly backwards and forwards to the accompaniment of low music from the band; gradually the band played faster and faster, |288 the swaying quickened, until it seemed as if her neck
must be dislocated by the violence of her movements, and her locks stretched
to their full extent threshed in a heavy mass, at one moment over her face
and bosom, the next down her back to her waist. She looked horrible, a very
Maenad. Suddenly she ceased, and stood as if dazed. Then with slow and
faltering step she began to wander round the circle, keeping the spectators
on her right hand. The pace gradually increased until she danced round, the
band keeping time to her every motion. The fairy hill lay to the north-west
of the place where we were sitting, and her eyes were constantly fixed in its
direction as she came round the circle and faced towards it.
I watched her very carefully, and for some time
failed to detect anything but an expression of entire abstraction from her
surroundings, till, in one of her circlings, she suddenly shot a glance at
us, which showed that, however much the fairies possessed her, she was still
fully conscious of our presence. At last, after many weary wanderings, she
halted by the band, the music of which dropped to the faintest murmur, and
listened first to a pipe then to a drum for the fairy voice, to be heard only
by her. There was a slight pause, and then she sang a couplet, which was
taken up and repeated by the village elders, who |289 formed a sort of chorus and sat by the band. The
onlookers listened with rapt attention, and it was easy to see that they were
full of implicit faith in the genuineness of the "possession," and
in the importance of the spoken words. Again and again the Dainyal spoke, her
words being caught up and repeated by the chorus of old men. Then she
wandered round the circle again, till she could think of something more to
say.
We were not deprived of interludes, comic and
otherwise. There was a man hanging some dyed clothes to dry in the bare
branches of a walnut tree, beyond which rose the fairy hill. The man's
presence, when he climbed high among the branches, infuriated the Dainyal,
and she tried hard to break the ring of spectators, and to get at him. She
was good-humouredly but firmly stopped, but the man was ordered out of his
tree at once, and she solaced herself by throwing stones at him. I never
quite made out what would have happened had she broken out of the ring while
under the influence of inspiration, but it was evidently something bad,
either for her or for the community at large, possibly for both.
At one period the Dainyal got tired, and sat
down on a drum waiting for water to be brought. During this interval a baby
began to cry, and was ordered to |290 be
removed by a peremptory glance and gesture, which were instantly obeyed. A
dog came gently wandering by to investigate what was going on, and retired
much injured in his feelings before a shower of stones, thrown by his
familiar friends in the crowd, for dogs and babies were particularly
distasteful to the Dainyal during her periods of active inspiration. When the
water arrived, an old man pronounced a long incantation over the gourd
containing it, then handed it to the woman, who, after drinking a little of it,
began again her weary wanderings, sprinkling the water as she went round the
circle. And so it went on, the Dainyal occasionally chewing a piece of the
sacred cedar as an additional help, until all the subjects she had learnt up,
or thought of interest to her hearers, were exhausted. She prophesied various
things in our favour, and gave vent to one or two shrewd sayings about local
abuses, which seemed to please her audience immensely. No doubt in the old
days public opinion could often only reach a chief in this manner, and full
advantage seems to have been occasionally taken of the opportunity, which the
performance of the Dainyal afforded, of enlightening the mind of an unpopular
ruler. Finally, when it was evident to all that the source of inspiration had
for the day run dry, a couple of men came into the ring, |291 and one of them stooping down and giving the Dainyal a
back, she took a run and flying leap on to it, and was so gracefully carried
out of the circle. A few minutes' rest in a neighbouring house, and a
sprinkling of water, enabled her to come to. The whole performance was
extremely curious, and there is no doubt whatever that the onlookers firmly
believed in the woman being inspired.
The ceremony of initiation is unpleasant; we
fortunately were spared seeing it. If any one, man or woman, claims to be
inspired by the fairies, they have to go through the rites described above
with a recognised Dainyal. At the end of the performance a goat is brought in
and decapitated, and the novice has to seize the neck and drink the spouting
blood. If successful in this, he or she is at once recognised as inspired. If
the ordeal is too much, then a contemptuous pity is extended to the aspirant,
as to one who has been on the verge of attaining to great things, but has
failed owing to personal defect. Those who cannot fulfil the conditions are
said invariably in the end to go mad.
The Bagrot valley, where we saw the Dainyal, was
further of interest in that about the best gold of the country is found in
its bed, and in the Gilgit river below where the Bagrot stream runs in. Every |292 year, after the summer floods are over, the deposits in
back waters and sand-banks are carefully washed, and a fair amount of gold,
considering the rough methods and unskilled labour of the prospectors, is
collected. When we first went to Gilgit pure gold was selling there at
two-thirds its price in
But if we could not collect gold, we set
ourselves to collect heads. The sport round Gilgit was magnificent for those
who could get time for it. Personally, I only managed twice to get away for
any length of time, once during my last months at Gilgit, when I got the best
ten days in the year, when the ibex in the spring are just off the snow
enjoying the fresh spring grass, and once in winter, when I went a little way
down the Indus valley after markhor. |294
This was within an ace of being my last shoot,
for I left my escort a march below Bunji, and made a dash for a nullah ten
miles lower down with only my shikari and servant. I had meant to be only one
day on this ground but heavy snow and rain came, and having seen some grand
markhor I stayed on three or four days. I was nearly shot for my pains, for
the Chilasis heard of my move, collected fifty men, and came up the valley to
rush my camp. Luckily for me the Gor men, with whom my shikari was connected,
assured them that I had only remained one day, and had returned to Bunji, and
they did not persevere in their search.
It was not a lucky expedition; the weather was
horrible, snow leopards spoilt my best stalk, which had practically lasted
three days, and as I was regaining my camp, walking along the bed of a ravine
in the dusk, I found myself confronted with an absolutely impassable place.
Perpendicular walls of conglomerate towered above me on either hand, the path
which had run along the cliff to the right had been destroyed by a spate in
the spring, and only a remnant, just visible a hundred feet away, showed
where it had been. We stood on a platform forty feet above the level of the
ravine bed below, the general slope of the stream bed being here broken by a
band |295 of huge rocks, at the base of which boiled sulphur
springs. In the fast-growing dusk it was impossible to find a way down. To
regain my camp by the way I had come meant a round of many miles and a climb
for several thousand feet, some of it in very bad ground. There was nothing
for it but to remain where we were, and to seek the shelter of the most
convenient rock. It was not very pleasant, for there was a sharp frost, we
had nothing to drink but sulphurous water, very little to eat, no spare
blankets beyond one from which I never parted, and, owing to the rain of the
previous days, we were in constant danger from falling stones, which had
pitted the rocks in the bed of the stream as if they had been under a heavy
musketry and shell fire. All night long above us we heard the roar of small
stone avalanches, followed by silence as the stones shot into space a
thousand feet above, and then by the rattle and crash as they struck the
stream bed. However we found a small water-worn cave, the mouth of which was
protected by a large rock, under the cliff from which most danger was to be
expected, and we passed a safe and fairly comfortable night Next morning,
after a very nasty shave of being brained by a falling stone, we discovered a
way down, which involved one of the worst pieces of |296 rock-climbing I ever came across. For about fifty feet
the only foothold was a line of depressions a couple of inches deep, the only
hold for the hands was well above one's head, and that was the smooth round
cornice of a water-worn rock round which the fingers could bend, but which
gave no grip; thirty feet below steamed the boiling sulphur water. It was
nearly too much for me, but the knowledge that breakfast was within half a
mile, that to go back meant several hours' work, carried the day. Even then I
could not have crossed without help, but my shikari, who was like a monkey,
got on to the cornice above me, and dropped me the end of his turban, with
the assistance of which I got over all right, the shikari moving along the
ledge above. It was impossible for him to get down at the end, and he had to
go back and follow by the path I had come, an easy enough job for him. My
weight and height were against me at performances of this sort, and I used to
envy my light and lithe shikari, to whom no ground came amiss.
One way or another we all had exciting times
stalking. I have a nightmare recollection of one snow slope, which dropped a
couple of thousand feet below one and ended in ghastly precipices, which we
had to cross to reach ibex. The slightest |297 slip
meant death, and we had no ropes or ice axes, nothing but one small alpen
stock with which to dig out steps in the frozen snow.
On the other hand, at certain seasons, both
markhor and ibex can be got on fairly easy ground, and during a severe winter
we have more than once watched markhor feeding on the slopes of the mountain
behind my house at Gilgit, on ground almost as easy as the
The altitude at which you find game depends
generally on the snow line, and the work is easier perhaps in winter than in
summer, except that you are handicapped by the shortness of the days, and
that in some valleys the lower ground is distinctly worse than the higher. To
me three-quarters of the enjoyment of the stalk lies in the scenery, in getting
up above the animals and studying them, perhaps for hours, in listening to
the call of the snow cock at dawn, in lying watching the little round-eared
rock rats, or the circling flight of the eagle, in the freedom and the
silence of the mountains. I always feel like a murderer when successful, and
miserable when I have missed, but I loved going out, and envied the
easier-worked subaltern under me, who could get away fairly often for his few
days' shoot. With all who worked under me I always went on one plan,----I
asked of them their best work and got it, and it was often at very high
pressure for weeks at a time, but the moment I could I gave leave |299 for shooting. The results were excellent, no man was
ever better or more loyally served, no man had ever a cheerier, brighter, and
harder set of officers working for him. |300
CHAPTER
IX
ADMINISTRATION
AND WAR
OUR first years in Gilgit passed in peace and
hard work, tempered by "excursions and alarms," born of the wild
and ever-varying plots and intrigues indulged in by my native friends on all
sides.
My position presented some of the curious
anomalies to which the Indian Administrator on the frontier is accustomed. I
was the representative of the British Government on the frontier, and the
external relations with the neighbouring States were under my control. But
the rule within the Gilgit border was in the hands of the Kashmir Governor,
while the command of the forces rested with the Kashmiri General, with the
proviso that no important move of troops should be undertaken without my
sanction. It was a difficult position, for every one recognised that, in
addition to my own responsibilities, I was really answerable for the proper
government |301 and progress of the Gilgit district, and for the
discipline and control of the troops.
The difficulty was solved by the formation of an
unrecognised Committee of Public Safety composed of the Governor, the
General, and myself. We met two or three times a week at my house and
discussed our various schemes, the necessary steps for which were invariably
carried out in the name of the Kashmir Durbar and by order of its own
officers. Even so the task set one was no easy one----a reformer's rarely is,
but patience and courtesy go a long way in the East. Personally my Kashmiri
colleagues and I were very good friends, and in the end what was required was
generally carried through. For the first few months we turned our attention
mainly to the re-modelling of the Forts occupied by the troops, with the
object of replacing the foul huts in them by proper barracks, and of building
suitable granaries and stores. Much time and labour were also spent in
improving the irrigation channels in the Gilgit district, on which the food
supply of the inhabitants and the troops depended. The whole subject of the
grain and other revenue was also gone into, and the question of the
improvement of the local communications exhaustively examined.
Christmas, 1889, saw the beginning of a series
of |302 gatherings of the neighbouring native chiefs, and of
their leading men, at Gilgit. I held a formal Durbar, and had as much trouble
over the precedence of the different chiefs as might have been expected in
The spring of the year 1890 was at Gilgit itself
one long struggle against incompetence and opposition on all hands. I went
down to Kashmir in the summer to interview the Resident, then on to Simla and
saw the Viceroy, Lord Lansdowne, and got promises of all that was wanted, and
cheering words of encouragement from one whom all men in India loved to
serve. The rabble in the Gilgit command were to be withdrawn, and I was to
have a couple of the new Kashmir Imperial Service regiments by the autumn. As
I wanted to see the engineers' stores, the staff for the new road, and all
the treasure, ammunition, and troops over the passes ahead of me, all of
which would take several months to collect, I took three months' leave and
went home, for there was nothing much to be done at Gilgit till my wants were
partially supplied, and the organisation of the troops and the collection of
stores was not in my hands. I could only point out my wants, my authority
only began on the Gilgit side of the passes.
During my absence, Manners-Smith acted for me;
the long-expected doctor went up to Gilgit in July, George Robertson passed
through, en route to Kafiristan, and lost all his baggage in the
My time was now fully occupied at Gilgit. The
year before I had drawn up complete schemes for putting the postal and
transport arrangements on a proper footing. Both had, of necessity, been shelved,
and. the matter had to be gone into again. The first difficulty was finally
solved by including Kashmir in the Imperial postal system of
On going into the question of supply I found
that the figures given me the year before by the Governor of Gilgit, with reference
to the grain revenue, were incorrect. There was a deficit of over a hundred
and forty tons of grain, no light matter with no surplus grain in the
country, and a brigade of troops and a mule battery to feed. By dint of the
most careful supervision the troops were fed, but at the beginning of June
1891, when the first crop was cut, I had but a week's consumption left in
hand. It was |306 most anxious work. My enquiries into the management of
the grain stores----the whole revenue of the district was paid in
grain----showed that extensive peculation was going on. After weeks of
patient investigation, I found that the Governor's right-hand man was the
chief culprit. I handed over the papers proving the case up to the hilt
against this man to the Governor, who acknowledged his servant's guilt, but
informed me that he would do all he could to prevent his being punished, and
that, if necessary, he would spend five hundred pounds in Kashmir to ensure
his acquittal.
The troops were now well and regularly fed so
far as their grain ration went, but they received no issue of salt, clarified
butter, etc., and I had another year's struggle with the Durbar before this
was righted. In
Feeling that the whole secret of supply for the
Gilgit troops lay in extending cultivation, I had turned my energies to
making water channels which would bring thousands of acres of waste land
under the plough. To this end I had obtained the services of a company of
Eighteen miles from Gilgit was the fort of
Nomal, which the tribesmen had besieged three years before. For fourteen
miles the road was fairly practicable for mules, but four miles were
impassable in summer. In winter the road ran down into the bed of the river,
and mules could use it, but when the snows began melting and poured their
floods down the valleys the lower road became impassable, and only men using
the upper path could reach Nomal. There were ominous mutterings of a coming
storm brewing in Hunza and Nagar, and it was imperative that I should be able
to move troops to Nomal and |309 reinforce the garrison at a moment's notice. The road was therefore taken in
hand in November 1890, and in a couple of months we had driven a good
six-foot road through the bad piece. It was not a pleasant road to ride over
when it was finished, for there were sheer drops of two and three hundred
feet into the river below, but it sufficed. The last hundred yards of the
worst bit of cliff nearly broke our hearts. The hillside was formed of
alternate layers of sand and loose water-worn stones, and, cut back as we
would, we could not get to firm ground. Four times our carefully-built
supporting walls Went with a run. The men were in despair, even my
ever-cheery Major Gokul began to despond. Then, at the men's request, we
sacrificed a goat, and made offerings to the god whose business it was,
erected a little cairn with a duly consecrated flag, rebuilt our walls with
layers of brushwood between the stones, and our road stood. I could now sleep
in peace so far as Nomal was concerned, and I turned my attention to the bad
cliffs between Gilgit and Bunji, and to the road further back.
The labour question was an incessant difficulty.
The people of the country were very bad at road-making, and, moreover, had
already plenty of work, and I had not enough tools to employ, or money to |310 pay, large numbers. The men of the Kashmir Imperial
Service Troops could not be taken away from their drills, musketry, and
hut-building. They had come up the autumn before made up into regiments it is
true, but they had received no instruction in the use of their arms, and were
useless from the military point of view when they arrived. Willing as they
were, they had to be licked into shape, and taught everything from the
beginning. It was out of the question to use them for road-making. I had
therefore nothing but my company of sappers, and for ten months they worked
on the roads practically every day, except on Sundays. It was hard on the
men, for road work is very severe, but it was absolutely necessary, and I did
my best by giving them extra food and pay to make it easy for them. The
result was excellent; before the passes opened we had made the road to Nomal,
opened a mule road between Gilgit and Bunji, a distance of thirty miles, and
run a track practicable for laden animals up most of the six thousand feet of
the dreadful
With the spring of 1891 from all directions came
renewed rumours of trouble. The Indus valley tribes, and indeed most of my
neighbours, habitually spent the winter, when there was no agricultural work
to do, in discussing the advantages and disadvantages of resuming their raids
on Kashmir territory, or of attacking each other, and in weaving plots.
Embassies passed from republic to republic, and from ruler to ruler,
suggesting combinations and general risings. It was the custom of the
country, and as a rule it meant but little, but this year, as the scraps of
information from all sides reached me, and were collated and pondered over,
it seemed to me that all tended to show that real mischief was brewing. The
threads I held in my hands persistently wove themselves into one pattern, and
that pattern meant war.
However, it was no business of mine to meet my
troubles half way, and we went about our work as usual. Thinking it would do
the troops good, I moved in April with a couple of guns and some infantry to
Gakuch in Punyal, forty miles from |312 Gilgit. The road I have described before; it was an education to the officers
and men of the mule battery, and also taught the infantry much that was
useful. The marches, short as they were, were very severe. The Governor of
Gilgit and the Kashmiri General accompanied the party, of which I was very
glad. We, of course, never left the troops, and saw them over the difficult
pieces. I gave the men meat rations occasionally, and we saw to their comfort
ourselves. This may seem not worth mentioning, but it was a revelation to the
Kashmiri officers. Most of the regimental officers and the men were already
with us, grateful for the increased comfort of their quarters, for the
punctual issue of pay, and for the good quality of their rations, but one and
all were unaccustomed to being cared for on the march by their superiors, and
appreciated the attention accordingly. Our little expedition had the best
effect on the troops. On our return to Gilgit it was much discussed, and I
heard with satisfaction that the Governor himself, in an assembly of the
senior officers at his house, had pointed the moral.
"Which of you," he said, "would
have remained out in the sun on the march, and come into camp with the men?
Not one. You would have all ridden on and made yourselves comfortable in
camp, and |313 left the men to look after themselves. It is the same
all through; no wonder that the 'ikbal' (the fortune) of the English
Government is great, and that they rule
In the beginning of May, as the snow was now
melting and the forests were approachable, we began to fell timber, and to
bring it down for the new quarters being built for the troops. The labour was
very severe, for the mountain torrents were too violent to admit of floating
logs down, and the whole of the wood had to be carried for ten miles by the
men. The work was hardly completed by the autumn. We found good timber and a
site for a summer camp a couple of hours' ride from my house, up a narrow
valley at the head of which was a pass leading to Darel. I went up there one
day in May to look at the timber, and to see if we could manage to erect a
saw-mill, for we had nothing of the kind, and all sawing had to be done by
hand. On my way down I heard that the expected storm had broken in Nagar.
The old chief of Nagar had a favourite son named Gauri Tham, who was married to the daughter of the Raja of Astor. I had met the boy there, and he had been a good deal in Gilgit. He was a very bright cheery fellow of about nineteen, a |314 capital polo player, and we were all fond of him. To my sorrow I heard that he and a younger brother had just been murdered by their elder brother, Uzr Khan. They lived in a village at the lower end of the Nagar valley, given them by their father to keep them out of Uzr Khan's way, and to enable them to reach the frontier quickly in case of trouble, and Gauri Tham had left his home on a visit to his |
distributing pieces to his small sons, and occasionally
to a favourite courtier. He would wander apparently aimlessly from subject to
subject, but you had to be very careful of what you said or admitted, for,
like lightning, would shoot out some 
the
tree-trunks were dark and rugged, dashed here and 
Hunza
and Nagar were, according to tradition, ruled by the same chief till some
centuries ago, when the ruler of the day divided the country between his two
twin sons, who were deadly enemies. The Hunza ruler was murdered by one of
his brother's adherents, and left an only daughter. This young lady fell in
love with her cousin, the son of the ruler of Nagar, and the lovers met,
necessarily by stealth, the prince swimming across the Hunza river every
night. The result was a son, the founder of the present line, which is called
Ayeshé, or heavenly; for, to conceal the mishap, the story in Hunza is that
the father was a prince from Shignan, but that his name having been forgotten
he was called Ayesho, or the " heaven-sent." 
After
Robertson had started for Kafiristan I broke up the camp, sent off all
coolies and most of the baggage, guard, etc., by single marches to Gilgit,
and prepared to move myself in either direction, as the fates might decide. I
paid the usual ceremonious visits to the Mehtar at the fort, took my guard
with me, had them put through their drill for the Mehtar's amusement, and
made them fire volleys at a mark. Their firing impressed the local people
very much; they were not accustomed to the Martini. The Mehtar offered to
present me with a little Kafir girl "habited proper," but I
declined the embarrassing offering.
place.
From a portion of the smoked grain a large unleavened bannock is made
overnight, which is carried before the Rá or Chief of Gilgit when he rides
out next morning to the sowing. Arrived on the selected ground the headman of
the village holds up to the Rá the skirt of his choga full of the smoked
grain, and into this the Rá throws small quantities of gold dust. The golden
grain is then scattered amongst the circle of villagers, the ceremony being
repeated till the grain has been thrown to all four points of the compass.
The Rá then dismounts, a plough is brought, and, taking the