84 BAD GROUND. 



easy matter, as it proved to be much larger than we expected. 

 After a good deal of work we managed to loosen it, when, 

 with the help of wooden levers cut for the purpose by Kur- 

 beer with his kookerie, we launched it over the mountain-side, 

 down which it went hurtling and crashing, smashing, and 

 carrying away everything that impeded its headlong course, 

 until it disappeared from our sight in a deep dark gorge far 

 below, where, as it dashed against rock and tree, an occasional 

 sullen boom was heard, the sounds and their echoes growing 

 fainter and more faint until they were no longer audible. 



After the rain had ceased it was too late to go up after 

 tahr, so we tried for gooral lower down, returning at dark 

 only to score in my note-book " a blank day." 



At daylight next morning we sent down our spare man 

 with the blankets, &c., giving him instructions to have the 

 traps we had left at the village taken by a lower route to our 

 next camping-place. At the same time Kurbeer, the shikaree, 

 and myself started with the intention of hunting over the 

 heights above, and joining the camp in the evening. Much 

 of the ground we had to get over was decidedly bad. On 

 some of the steep slopes we traversed the grass was, at this 

 season, so dry and slippery as to make the foothold very pre- 

 carious, and they, as often as not, terminated abruptly on the 

 brink of a sheer precipice. I must say I was rather staggered 

 at the look of one very awkward place we came to, which 

 there was no means of avoiding. As seen from below, it 

 appeared to me to be a nearly perpendicular craggy precipice 

 of at least fifteen hundred feet high. But our guide said 

 it was quite practicable, and as it had to be scaled, there was 

 no use looking at it for the more one looks the less one likes 

 such a place, we therefore commenced the ascent. It was 

 not so difficult, however, as it at first appeared, except in a few 

 places where one or other of my companions had sometimes to 

 place a hand from below on the nearly vertical face of some 

 smooth rock for a step ; there were juniper bushes, too, here 



