A SUMMER IN HIGH ASIA. 



I had chosen the Chorbat road ; but my troubles 

 were yet to come ! One Sahib, he said, had lost 

 some ponies, with all his heads and much of his 

 baggage, and I trembled for the safety of my 

 precious ibex horns, now on their way to Kashmir. 



He also brought me a note from B. with whom 

 he had been, and who had shot an ibex with a 

 head of forty-six inches in the Tashgaum Nalah 

 (the one where the sportsman from Aden had been 

 so unlucky), which head proved to be the largest 

 shot by anybody that season. The letter was full 

 of the praises of Saibra. While encamped here I 

 shot two marmots, but they were bagged with some 

 difficulty, as the first one was not retrieved until 

 the torrent had been forded, whilst the other one 

 went to ground under some big rocks, and was 

 not recovered until Sultana, one of my Kash- 

 miri coolies, had been pushed down the hole 

 head foremost, and then withdrawn by the 

 heels. I found that for marmots my little '300- 

 bore rifle was by far the best weapon, as, if 

 wounded by a shot-gun, they almost invariably 

 escape. The wild flowers here were most beautiful, 

 and amongst others I noticed a small viola which 

 I saw nowhere else, and in places the ground was 

 covered with tufts of a lilac and a white primula, 

 whose blossoms grew singly, without a stalk, 

 looking like stars on the green tufts. I had 

 intended to cross the Pass on the following 

 day, but the storms were so frequent that the 



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