378 
M. A. Stein —Topography of the Pir Pantsdl Rotite. [No. 4, 
bank of the united stream wliich from here bears the name of Remhyara 
(Skr . Romany atari ). The valley which is clothed with luxuriant fir 
forest, gradually widens, and after a march of about II miles from 
1 Allabad Sarai we reach Hor a por , the Curapura of the Chronicles, which 
is the first permanently inhabited place in the valley and the end sta¬ 
tion of the route through the mountains. Some four miles below 
Hoi^por the Rembyara enters the open valley of Ka^mir. 
Kalhana’s first reference to this mountain-route is connected with 
a local legend which he relates to us in the account of King Mihirakula's 
reign. Notwithstanding the wholly erroneous date which the artificial 
chronology adopted in the first three cantos of the Rajataraijginl assigns 
to this prince, modern research could not fail to recognize in the latter 
the White Hun ruler of that name whose reign, according to the 
epigraphical evidence first collected by Mr. Fleet, 1 must be placed at 
about 515-550 a.d., and of whom we know from Hiuen Tsiang’s account 
that his rule extended also over Ka^mir. 
In full agreement with the accounts given of Mihirakula’s cha¬ 
racter by the Chinese pilgrim Sung-yun who personally met the king- 
in Gandliara, and a century later by Hiuen Tsiang, the Ka^irian 
Chronicle represents him as a ruler of extreme cruelty. Among other 
legendary anecdotes which are intended to illustrate this feature in 
Mihirakula’s chai-acter, it is related of him (Rajatararjgini, i. 302-303) 
that, when he reached on his return from a tour of conquest through 
the whole of India the 1 Gate of Ka^-mlr ’ (Kdgmiram dvaram) and heard 
there the death cry of an elephant which had fallen down a precipice, lie 
was so delighted by these gruesome sounds that he had a hundred other 
elephants forcibly rolled down at the same spot. 
The locality here meant is in the text only generally indicated by 
the term dvara , which is uniformly applied in the Chronicle to all moun¬ 
tain-passes leading into Ka^mir. In order to identify it, we have to 
turn to the notice of the old glossator A 2 in Rajanaka Ratnakantha’s 
Codex (see note on i. 302 in my Edition) which says : ‘ From that time 
onwards the route by which Mihirakula returned, bears the name of 
Hastivanja.’ 
That this notice is old appears from Abu-l-fazVs Rajataraqgini ex¬ 
cerpts in the Aln-i Akbari (transl. by Col. Jarrett, JBibl. Ind., ii., p. 383), 
in which the place of the event related by Kalhana is referred to under 
the name of 1 Hastivatar. That the latter form is only a clerical error for 
Hastivanj , easily explained in Persian writing, can clearly be seen from a 
comparison of the Persian Chronicles of Ndrdyan Kol and Bir a bol Kdbser u 
1 Compare his paper ‘On the history and date of MihirakulaIndian Antiquary 
xv., pp. 245 sqq. 
