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These were divided amongst squads of four men, relieved every fifty yards, so that the progress did not exceed a mile an hour, the men being often up to their middle in snow in a bitter wind and a glaring sun. The camping-ground at Langar, some 13 miles from Teru, was not reached till near midnight, and the guns had to be left by their exhausted bearers a mile or so outside the camp.
At eleven o'clock the train left Kothan station, and it was nearly two o'clock in the afternoon when it reached Keria, having left behind the small stations of Urang, Langar, Pola and Tschiria. In 1889-90 this road was followed by Pevtsoff from Kothan to Lob-Nor at the foot of the Kuen Lun, which divides Chinese Turkestan from Tibet.
As the full Memoir of Butler on which I am engaged is not yet ready for publication, I have again revised the sketch, and it is here published in response to many demands for some account of his life. H. F. J. August, 1913. Samuel Butler was born on the 4th December, 1835, at the Rectory, Langar, near Bingham, in Nottinghamshire. His father was the Rev.
At Langar there is only one little wretched hut about six feet square, which was used as a shelter by the officers and one or two sick men, the remainder huddling round fires in the snow. Luckily, as I have already said, there was a plentiful supply of wood to be had for the cutting.
The march was not more than ten miles; but Borradaile's party, though they left Langar at daylight, did not reach Laspur till seven o'clock at night. The slope over the pass was a gradual one, and it was the depth of the snow, alone, that caused so much delay.
They were probably not all well armed, or well trained, or well disciplined, but as to large numbers there can be little reasonable doubt. A relic of this may be seen every year at modern Haidarabad, the capital city of H.H. the Nizam, where, at the annual festival known as the "Langar," armed irregulars in very large numbers file through the principal streets.
Shortly after this, Gough came up, saying that the Kashmir troops in the post had volunteered to make a road through the snow, and if he could take fifty of them with four days' rations to Teru, a sufficient track might be made to Langar, our next camping ground, just this side of the pass, to enable the guns to be carried there without much difficulty.
Trials were then made of the ground at the sides of the valley, but the snow was found equally deep and soft there; and after spending an hour or so in futile attempts to get forward, it became evident to all that no animal could possibly pass over the snowfield in its present condition. We had only gone some eight miles out of the thirteen to Langar, and it was already three o'clock.
The distance from Langar to Laspur on the other side of the pass is only ten miles, but though Borrodaile's party of Pioneers and Levies started early next day, they did not reach Laspur till evening. The villagers were as surprised as though the party had dropped from the moon, and thought it expedient to be friendly.
Epitaphs always fascinated him, and formerly he used to say he should like to be buried at Langar and to have on his tombstone the subject of the last of Handel's Six Great Fugues.
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