THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 97 



the intervening ten were killing to one in my condi- 

 tion, for the dandy was of no use upon them, and 

 I had to trust entirely to my own hands and feet. 

 These ten miles took me exactly twelve hours, with 

 only half an hour's rest. The fastest of my party took 

 nine hours to the whole distance, so that I must have 

 gone wonderfully fast considering that I had rheu- 

 matism besides dysentery, and could take nothing ex- 

 cept a very little milk, either before starting or on the 

 way. The track for it could not be called a path, 

 and even goats could hardly have got along many 

 parts of it ran across the face of tremendous slate 

 precipices, which rose up thousands of feet from the 

 foaming and thundering Sutlej. Some rough survey 

 of these dining or cliffs was made, when it was pro- 

 posed to continue the Hindiisthan and Tibet road 

 beyond Pangay, a project which has never been 

 carried out; and Mr Cregeen, executive engineer, 

 says of them, in No. CLXVI. of the "Professional 

 Papers on Indian Engineering," " in the fifth march 

 to Spooi, 1 the road must be taken across the cliffs 

 which here line the right bank of the Sutlej in mag- 

 nificent wildness. The native track across these cliffs, 

 about 1500 feet above the crossing for the Hindiis- 



1 Pu is the name of this place, but the natives sometimes 

 call it Piii, the i being added merely for the sake of euphony, 

 as the Chinese sometimes change Shu, water, into Shui. In 

 the Trigonometrical Survey map it has been transformed 

 into Spuch. Where Mr Cregeen found his version of it I 

 cannot conceive. 



VOL. III. G 



