the Karumbar valley of Yasin. According to the presence or absence of snow on a particular peak in this part of the main valley do the Hunza people know whether the Irshad Pass is or is not open. A little later we crossed, on the east bank, the deep and narrow gorge down which the Khunjerab River flows from the Khunjerab Pass, leading on to the Taghdumbash Pamir. On the fifth day, following up the valley, which gradually rose, and was filled with clumps of willow and birch in the river's bed, we reached Murkush, just below the junction of the two nullahs that conduct respectively to the Kilik and Mintaka Passes, leading on to the same Pamir. Pursuing the former or left-hand of these, we camped at an elevation of 13,360 feet (having risen 5400 feet since leaving Baltit), at a few miles from the foot of the Kilik Pass. On the morrow we crossed the latter. I took the elevation on the summit with a boiling-point thermometer, ordinary thermometer, and aneroid, and found it to be 15,870 feet. The top of the Kilik is a long flattish plateau, covered with stones and interspersed with grassy swamps and standing water. There was no snow on the pass itself, though the snow-line was but little above us on the surrounding mountains, which were draped in white. This is the pass of which Captain Grombchevski, who crossed it in August 1888, penned the somewhat hyperbolic report that it is "exceedingly easy, so that a cart with a full team of horses could follow it". Here we bade good-bye to the Thum of Hunza and his men, the limits of whose jurisdiction we had reached, and were met by Kasim Beg, the Kirghiz chief of the Taghdumbash Pamir, who was a Chinese subject, and who had received instructions to attend upon us while in Chinese territory. I sat down on a rock at the top of the pass and completed a letter to the Times, as whose special correspondent I was acting. The letter would go southwards with the streams that flow into the Indus and so into the great Indian Ocean. My own face was turned towards the north, where at my feet I could see the springs whose waters, running eastwards, were ultimately to lose themselves in the great Tibetan depression of Lob Nor; while within a few miles of me, on the other side, the rills were trickling westwards that would presently merge in the mighty Oxus, and wend their way through the heart of Central Asia to their distant home in the Aral Sea. I stood, therefore, literally upon the water-parting, the Great Divide of the Asiatic Continent. India, with all its accumulated treasures, lay behind me, ring-fenced by the terrific barriers through and across which I had laboriously climbed. Central Asia, with its rival domination and its mysterious destinies, lay before me. I was on the southern eave of the "Roof of the World". Before me, in the language of Milton, A frozen continent Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms But the Pamirs are another story, which I cannot tell here. |