Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/110

104 camels and horses would here slip and fall. Obstacle the second looked forbidding enough to stop the whole force for a day or more. Again we went on – the pass becoming narrower and narrower, until it would have been impossible for two horsemen to ride abreast in it. On either side rose almost perpendicular walls of rock to a height of over 1000 feet. Half-a-dozen men at the summit of either cliff could, by tilting over boulders and dropping down stones, close the road to the whole force, until the heights on either side could be crossed, and that would have been a work of a day or more. At last, after passing many nasty spots, through which it seemed unlikely that the bhoosa-loaded camels would be able to squeeze without losing their loads, we came to Dabarrah – i. e., "the rock" – and scrambled up and over it with difficulty. Obstacle the last seemed to bar further progress altogether. A square mass of limestone, full 40 feet in diameter, had many years before fallen from above, and jammed between the walls of the defile, a foot or two from the ground. The action of water had gradually filled up its self-made bed above the fallen rock, over one of whose now rounded sides the little stream broke in a pretty cascade. On the other side the curve of the rock inwards, and a corresponding concavity in the face of the cliff, would give a camel a width of 5 feet clear, could a ramp be made of sufficient height for the purpose.

Natives called this the easiest pass through the range in Shirani country. Two military officers, who had pluckily reconnoitred through it some years before, had enthusiastically reported that but for the one obstacle of the Dabarrah rock, which would have to be shattered with gunpowder, guns could traverse it without difficulty. I have no doubt we were all very depressed as we sat on the top of that awful rock, and longed for the dynamite or blasting powder, and the tools and the sappers which should have been with us, but were not. I was the first to speak.

"Well, can it be done?" I asked.

"It's not an easy business; but it has to be done, and it must be done," was the soldier-like reply of the General's Chief of the Staff, a Highlander and great skikari, and therefore a splendid hill-walker. We got back to camp about dark. That night a halt for the morrow was ordered, and arrangements were made for sending out all available men in working-parties by dawn next day. From General downwards there was gloom on every face; and but that the recorded opinions of two military experts coincided with that of my native informants as to the character of the defile, I should probably have been roundly blamed for the inaccuracy of my intelligence. On such occasions the political officer is always the scapegoat at the time, though justice is generally done him afterwards. The whole of the next day was spent in bridge-making, road-making, ramping, and endeavouring to blow off two awkward corners of the Dabarrah rock with saluting-powder, for we had no other explosives.

"A pocketful of dynamite cartridges would have wrought magic there," said the colonel of a pioneer regiment, whom a love of adventure had induced to join what he called the Takht "picnic."

"Yes; it would have let the bhoosa through without unloading