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The remainder of the flour was distributed among the sepoys, and we took as much grain as we could find carriage for, but it was very little. A small convoy of Punyal Levies joined us that day; they had been foraging up the Yarkhun valley, and had been sent after us by Moberly. Our road led along the valley through cornfields and orchards, which, in spite of the rain, looked very pretty and green.
He halted that night at Sanoghar, where he collected some fifty coolies, and learned by signal from Mastuj that Bretherton was sending some fifty Yarkhun coolies the next day fifty Punyal Levies also joined him that evening. Starting the next morning, he reached Buni by 5 P.M., when he found Jones and the remains of the Sikhs.
The Hunza and fifty Punyal Levies were sent to reconnoitre towards Nisa Gol that day, and fifty more Punyals up the Yarkhun valley to forage. The rest of the day was spent in writing reports, making out official returns, and other necessary nuisances.
After leaving Buni, the road runs for some distance along flat ground until the junction of the Turikho and Yarkhun rivers is reached. At this point the road leads up along the face of a cliff and then down on to a small plain, where are a few houses and some patches of cultivation.
We reached the Goland Gol, which is a narrow nullah running up into the hills on the left bank of the river, the sides being impracticable for several miles, and down the centre of which rushes a mountain torrent, the road to Chitral crossing this latter, just before it flows into the Yarkhun river, by means of a bridge.
At his feet the Yarkhun river whirled and foamed, a grey glacier torrent, thick with the milky scum of ice-ground salt; beyond it the ink-black gorge leading to the summit was shrouded in a scroll of threatening cloud; and the first natives whom they questioned as to the state of the pass replied unconcernedly that it had been closed four days; adding that no man who valued his life would attempt to cross it in uncertain weather.
There were two: desperate resources both, yet one degree better than imprisonment in the Yarkhun valley till it pleased the snows to melt. They could follow the course of the river to Chitral, no Frontier outpost then, but an independent Native State; or work their way, by faith and courage, through the wild Swat country to the Punjab.
I suppose we went up at least two thousand feet. I was all right, as I had a pony, but it must have been agony for the laden coolies. Once up, the going was easy enough; open, grassy downs, gradually sloping down from where we stood to the junction of the Yarkhun and Turikho valleys, though the actual sides of the tableland dropped steeply down to the rivers.
We dropped over the bluff and forded the Laspur stream, which was hardly over the men's knees, and then kept along the bed of the river, with a few scouts well up the hills on our left, the Mastuj or Yarkhun river protecting our right.
I knew the place as one of the worst bits in the whole road between Mastuj and Chitral, but I also knew it could be passed by crossing the river at Khogazi and climbing the hills on the right hand, and down on to the Chitral river above its junction with the Yarkhun river.
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