An Untimely Death. 



with feelings of regret at the untimely death of the poor beast. 

 The Kirghiz above were in an agitated state of mind, weeping 

 and wailing, calling on Allah to save them, and generally behaving 

 as though their last hour had come. I at once gave orders for 

 the remaining yaks to be off-loaded, and the kit stacked on the 

 spot, intending to come up the next day and man-haul everything 

 down. I left Piro in charge, directing him to bring the unladen 

 yaks on as rapidly as possible to the Kirghiz encampment, still 

 a long way down the valley, in search of which I now set out 

 with Nadir and Giyani. On the way we endeavoured to get an 

 idea of the direction the fallen yak had taken, but the gathering 

 gloom and mist overhanging the slopes beneath the summit 

 prevented our seeing anything of him. We went down several 

 hundred feet following parallel to the course of his descent, but 

 beyond the same terrific slope, of seemingly illimitable depth, 

 could see nothing, so concluded he must have fallen a tremendous 

 distance, in which conjecture we were right as was proved by our 

 investigations the next day. 



Some 2,000 feet below the summit we passed a solid wall of 

 frozen snow and ice, now rapidly developing into a glacier that 

 would probably in future years come down the valley and block 

 up entirely the path through the ravine, though at the time 

 there was no immediate indication of this. From here we passed 

 through the bed of the ravine, a mass of rocks and shale, and 

 then over a gravel and mud-strewn moraine rendered heavy and 

 sodden by the fast-melting snow. A further descent brought us 

 to open grassy slopes with a narrow ravine on either side through 

 which flowed streams fed from the snows above, finally uniting 

 at a point further down the valley. 



I searched the entire ground here hoping to sight the Kirghiz 

 encam.pment I had heard so much about from the guide, but 

 nothing could be seen except the rocky bed of the streams and 

 the walls of dark moraine above them. Continuing for some 

 distance we reached the confluence of the streams, thence went 

 along the valley on the right bank, where the grassy slopes were 



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