A SUMMER IN HIGH ASIA. 



high rocks on the right bank. The idea was that the rafts 

 were to ply on the hawser. The experiment proved a 

 dangerous one. The rapidly uncoiling ropes caught me by 

 the foot while attending to the navigation of the first boat. 

 I was thrown down immediately and dragged to the side 

 of the raft. Happily the hawser parted at an unobserved 

 flaw. Communications were, however, established, and 

 three days afterwards the party had set out for the 

 Karawul Dawan. All danger to the Central Asian trade 

 was now over. The Karawul Dawan Pass is merely a 

 steep hillside, very wearying to tired ponies, but never 

 impassable. It might have been thought that the great 

 altitude of the Sasser Pass, over 18,000 feet, would have 

 rendered it impossible for regular traffic to cross it. This 

 is not altogether so. The road is very rough, and marvel- 

 lous wastes of ice and snow meet on the Sasser glacier. 

 They present those difficulties to the traveller on the Pass, 

 which must be inherent in the Arctic desolation of the 

 place, where there is no sign of human habitation except 

 the little stone huts of the goat-herds who pasture their 

 flocks below the Pass in summer. The rise to the glacier 

 is gradual, crossing a moraine where patches of grass in 

 July are studded with edelweiss and Alpine flowers. The 

 glacier itself is a broad sheet of ice deeply covered with 

 hard frozen snow and shut in on either hand by splintered 

 crags glistening with snow and ice. The eternal silence 

 is only broken by the passage of the caravans. Provided 

 that the road is not blocked by fallen fragments of ice, the 

 negotiation of the Sasser is less wearying to animals than 

 the ascent of the comparatively low Zojila. 



Here the work of my party ceased. They might well 

 claim to have done yeoman's service for the Empire. 

 Within two months a broken mountain road of two 

 hundred miles, crossing three large rivers and three passes 

 of over 17,000 feet, had been put into a condition to carry 

 the Central Asian trade without further hitch and was in 



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