A Canvas Canoe 289 



an exit into the Karumbar river. No touch of 

 colour relieved the black and white of rock and 

 snow, except on the margin of the lake where the 

 early snow had melted, and strips of green showed 

 us the summer grass had not yet faded. To these 

 we directed our glasses, in the hope that white 

 dots would reveal the wild geese we were in quest 

 of ; but never a one was visible, nor after a pro- 

 longed examination were wild-fowl of any descrip- 

 tion to be seen on the whole broad bosom of the 

 lake. It was too late in the year, no doubt, and the 

 geese and duck, which breed here in the summer, 

 had migrated southward. Some of the narrower 

 arms of the lake which the wind did not touch 

 were already coated with a steel-blue film of ice, 

 and though the month was only October, the wind 

 from Wakhan which blew after sunset, the piercing 

 nature of which has passed into a proverb in these 

 parts, was enough to freeze one's very marrow. 

 Still, geese or no geese, the "Alys" was to be 

 launched. Built in Canada of pine and canvas, so 

 light a single man could carry her, she had come 

 by sea to Bombay, by train to Peshawar, on mule- 

 back to Chitral, and thence on men's shoulders to 

 our lake of Kul-Sar, a basin hollowed by glaciers, 

 15,000 feet above the ocean. Here she was to 

 emerge at last from her chrysalis ; and in truth 

 this start in her career was peculiarly appropriate, 



T 



