Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/112

106 above us like the point of a rusty lance. The camp was pitched at the head of a cleft in the main range, down which rushed in a series of waterfalls and rapids the Dràband Zàin river, now reduced to about the volume of a small trout-stream. Next day we marched almost due south, skirting the Takht. The route lay up the bed of the Dràband river. Many of us were now not quite so festive as we had been a few days before. The hot sun by day, the freezing nights, but more especially the bad water we had been drinking, began now to make head and stomach a little sick. The water at our last camp had been very peculiar. It drew the mouth and throat a little when drunk, much as "very dry," and probably very much alumed, sherry does; but when put on the table with meat and tinned vegetables, as soup, it was positively undrinkable. The taste was bitter as quinine.

We were now opposite the place of ascent. The main mass, hitherto to east, north, and west apparently an unscalable natural fortress, with scarped precipitous sides, thousands of feet in depth, here threw out a little spur towards our camp, as it were a buttress for self-support. Though very steep, the ascent of the first two miles was clearly easy enough; but beyond, our glasses could only distinguish a sort of knife-edge, with here and there pine-trees in groups, and singly contorted rocks and black-looking chasms. This was the Pazai, or "woman's nose" path. But where was the spring? It had not yet been found. I had sent on some of my best scouts and spies to look for it. Presently we heard several shots fired, and soon after some of my men were seen running back, wild with excitement and full of wilder stories of attack and destruction. By degrees all came back but one – the only mounted police orderly I had taken with me. The General and some other officers, well escorted, now went forward to reconnoitre, and soon found the poor fellow hacked to pieces. The route lay up the tortuous bed of a strong nullah or torrent. Here and there a little dampness in the ground indicated the presence of water; narrower and narrower grew the nullah, and yet there was no water. The pent-up excitement of those minutes was intense – to me at least: on the finding of a living spring depended the success or failure of the expedition – credit or discredit to myself. On we went. Suddenly we saw a little small puddle, and heard the delicate and delicious music of water trickling over pebbles. On we pushed, and there, sure enough, was a tiny spring at the very head of the nullah, gushing out of the rock.

"With careful troughing and guarding it will be enough for the whole force," was the dictum of the General. As if conscious of our success, the hidden enemy above us – for by this time we knew that the passage of that nasty-looking knife-edge was to be disputed – fired off some twenty or thirty shots, and precipitated some huge boulders, which reverberated grandly as they rolled and leapt down into a deep basin on our left. Next day the General moved camp to the Pazai spring, and we made ourselves as safe and comfortable as the confined and sloping nature of the ground would permit.

Some of us amused ourselves during the afternoon by watching through our glasses the mountain fanatics, who had assembled to oppose our ascent. To get at them we had to traverse between two and three miles, with a rise