168 SPORT AND TRAVEL 



my camp being pitched in a wooded ravine away 

 from any village; and on the 29th we ascended 

 to Balochi, again half-way up the mountain-side, 

 where another day of rest was imperative, though 

 any delay, with the prospect of good shooting ahead, 

 was annoying and irksome. There were only three 

 hens in this town, but I managed to collect two 

 dozen eggs in fairly good condition, which evidently 

 had been stored up as they had been laid, and with 

 a sheep for mutton and a cow-yak to supply us 

 with milk, we proceeded on the 1st of July to my 

 markhor shooting-ground in the Mishkin Nullah, 

 descending to my camp-ground in a snowstorm so 

 thick that, until we reached the clearing chosen by 

 Kadera, one could see barely a rod in any direction. 

 It cleared away as suddenly as it had come, dis- 

 closing such a view as seldom falls to the lot of man 

 to behold. The tent was pitched in a field of pur- 

 ple and white flowers, from which on three sides 

 the confines of the nullah rose abruptly, but whose 

 fourth side opened out to the mouth of the valley, 

 where a range of superb snow-mountains rose in the 

 distance the Haramosh range, 24,285 feet high. 

 Sitting with my pipe by the camp-fire that evening, 

 with the ten days* work behind, and watching the 

 afterglow on those magnificent peaks and the shad- 

 ows creeping up in the valley below, I experienced 



