THE MEHTAR OF CHITRAL The deep damnation of his taking-off. SHAKSPEARE, Macbeth, Act I. Sc. 7. O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; SHAKSPEARE, Hamlet, Act III. Sc. 3. In a later passage in this book I mention how it came about that in the autumn of 1894, after visiting the Pamirs and determining the true source of the Oxus, I crossed the main range of the Hindu Kush by the Baroghil Pass (12,460 feet) and followed the main course of the Yarkhun River in the company of Captain (now Sir Francis) Younghusband to Chitral. I was anxious to visit that little border state, because I realised its great importance, owing to its geographical position, in the scheme of frontier defence of the Indian Empire, and was convinced of the necessity of closing this small chink in the mountain palisade, which at that time Russia showed such a persistent desire to penetrate at whatever point she could find an entrance. In this chapter I propose to relate the incidents of my journey, to describe the features and inhabitants of that remote and little-known country, and to tell how my host, the ill-starred Mehtar of Chitral, came by his doom. Colonel Woodthorpe, Captain (afterwards Sir Edmund) Barrow, Captain Younghusband, and Lieut. Cockerill were the only Englishmen who had previously descended by this route; but my journey, made at the beginning of October, proved, as the Mehtar of Chitral afterwards told me, that though very difficult in summer, while the river is in flood and the glaciers require to be crossed, it is available from the early autumn till the late spring, when the water is sufficiently reduced to admit of the valley track being followed in or near the river-bed. Still it is not the most comfortable of experiences to be compelled, as I was on my first march, to ford a broad and rushing mountain torrent, whose force and volume nearly lift a pony from its legs, as many as twelve times in the day. In the same march I passed six glaciers, descending in snow-white cascades to the river's brink. As the evening sun shone from the glittering snow peaks behind them on to their splintered crests, and then stained crimson the jungle in the valley bottom, already reddening to the fall, I thought that I had rarely seen anything more sublime. Above Mastuj the river-bed straggled out into a respectable width, and contained a good deal of such low timber-willow, poplar, juniper, and birch. Below Mastuj it contracted and frequently assumed the conformation of a narrow and re-echoing gorge. The villages were occasional bunches of green, perched high above the torrent, upon the alluvial fan-shaped deposits that had been swept |