JS6*2.] Notes of a trip from Simla to the Spiti Valley. 
505 
to mind the bars of a gridiron. Most of the men wear necklaces of 
large amber beads or turquoise of very irregular shapes, but very fre¬ 
quently an inch or more in diameter. The amber is mostly sulplmr- 
eolored and it is by no means easy to purchase a fine necklace, as 
they seem to be regarded as heir-looms, and are all brought from 
“ Maha-chin.” Besides these large beads, the less affluent wear 
smaller ones of glass, agate or coral, though usually with a few beads 
of their favorite amber or turquoise intermixed. Some beads are a 
very clever imitation of dark onyx of Chinese manufacture, which is 
not readily detected, save on close examination. They are the same 
1 believe as are met with occasionally in Hindustan, where they are 
called “ Solim'ains,” and are greatly prized, though none here can 
tell where they originally came from.* The women wear similar 
I have subsequently been able to procure a good number of these antique agate 
beads at Benares, and have little doubt that the whole of them are originally 
derived from the mounds and ruins at Bamean and other spots in the Cabul 
territory, where gems, beads, coins and other relics of Gra-co-Bactrian manufac¬ 
tures are found after the rains have ploughed up the soil. 
The beads are of all shapes and sizes, spherical, cylindrical, fusiform or bar¬ 
rel shaped, and of various materials, dark agate with white bands, onyx, earne- 
lian, jade, black schist with white bands, lapis lazuli, rock crystal, obsidian (?) 
blue and white porcelain, and glass and enamel of various colours. Many other 
sorts of stone as amethyst and bloodstone also occur, but I could not satisfy myself 
that these were antique, though they possibly may be. The single obsidian bead 
is cut as a polygon with numerous small faces, and I consider it as obsidian ra¬ 
ther than a dark enamel, from its having been drilled, which glass or enamel beads 
never are, and consequently exhibit a much larger and more irregular or gaping 
perforation ; and as obsidian occurs in Kattiawar, it might have been procured. 
The most curious beads of all are, however, of agate or carnelian inlaid with 
a cream-coloured enamel. Of these I have several patterns, cylindrical, spherical, 
fusiform or flattened. One round bead is ornamented all over with elongate 
spots formed by pitting the surface of the carnelian and filling the depression 
with enamel. Another is ornamented with circles formed in the same way, while 
the fusiform beads have two narrow circles at either extremity, from which 
alternately five lines are carried half way down and connected round the middle 
of the bead by a zig-zag line, like that uniting two layers of cells in a honey¬ 
comb. Of this sort of bead I have a curious but rough imitation in enamel 
which is probably antique, and the same pattern is also wrought on smaller 
polygonal beads of dark agate. The cylinders are either carnelian or dark agate 
with four or five cream-coloured beads carried round them. In all these the pat¬ 
tern is engraved as a deep groove on the surface of the agate and then filled in, 
flush with the surface, with enamel, and so nicely executed are some of these 
beads that a good glass in well executed specimens fails to reveal the mode of 
manufacture save in a fractured or weather-worn part. 
The better-shaped of these brown beads are largely used for studs and buttons, 
after being carefully rounded and polished, which last process brings out the 
white bands in beautiful contrast with the brown colour. This brown is some¬ 
time so intense as to be even black and is merely superficial, being probably pro¬ 
duced by some process similar to that now in vogue in Europe, where a similar 
result is produced by steeping the agate in oil, which sinks into the porous 
bands of the stone and then boiling it in sulphuric acid which chars the oil and 
3 u 
