Meean Meer. 



then I have had many chains and anchors of various 

 forms and materials. The last one I remember was 

 what I then thought poetry, but now know to have been 

 very poor doggerel, which I made during a month when 

 snowed up once in the Himalayas. It shared the fate 

 of its many predecessors. 



After a tedious journey up the Indus I arrived with 

 my detachment at Meean Meer, which is a large military 

 station within four miles of Lahore, the capital of the 

 Punjab. I have never been able to find out from man 

 or book the reason why this site was chosen for a 

 cantonment. The Sikhs had, in former days, made of 

 it a resting-place for their dead. The entire surface 

 of the ground is covered by a stratum, several feet thick, 

 of kiinkur, which is a deposit of the drift period, formed 

 of nodules composed of lime, silica, and alumina. This 

 makes the soil so barren that hardly a blade of grass, 

 let alone a shrub, will grow on it without special cultiva- 

 tion. Various attempts at planting trees met with 

 failure, until at last some ingenious person conceived 

 the idea of boring holes right through the kiinkur, and 

 planting in them. The residents of this station were 

 yearly impaled on the horns of a dilemma, for if they 

 left nature to herself, the heat from the white plain was 



