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has grown into the British Empire in India-dates from the fighting at Swally in 1615.

Of Downton's own bearing through it all we can judge by this passage in his journal:

"The third of Februarie there came to the water side twentie four Bales Indico, seven packs white Bastas, seven packs black Bastas, six packs cotton yarn, four packs blue Bastas, three packs Caudikens, one pack Crecany, al which were presently fetcht aboord; this day also the Viceroy's supplies came in sight, which were two ships of burthen, two Junkes, and eight or ten of the Country Boates. The Nabob sent Lacandas to informe me that these supplies were not for warre, but fild full of combustible matter to fire, and so to be let drive with the tide upon our ships in the night; which advise I was glad to understand, and addressed myself to prevent that, and all other their attempts with smaller ships. The Spring [tide, of course, not season] now neere the highest, the fittest for their assaultes, which every tide I expected and to shew that I was in a readinesse to intertaine them, as also how little I cared for them (having all the time formerly ridden without the like), I purposed and performed the setting and cleering of our watch, Morning and Evening, with a volley of shot from every ship, and the best Peece in my shippe directed to the prow of the Viceroy, which I did to daunt the courage of them hee must employ, and to try his temper, whether it would make him angry or no, and I still think it

proved to good end. It pleased God this day at night, when I had least leasure to mourne, to call to his mercie my onely son, George Downton, who early the next morning was buried ashore, and the volleyes aforesaid, appointed to try the temper of the Viceroy, served also to honour his buriall."

In this paragraph, which begins with a clerkly entry of goods received and ends with a sentence of Christian stoicism and sixteenth-century "virtú,” is embodied the soul of the first generation of the English in India. They were traders both punctual and exact, fighters of the stoutest when there was need, and withal they carried a certain Elizabethan plumea sense that they were spreading not only the trade but the renown of their people; and they loved the defiant gesture in the face of peril and the emphatic well-turned phrase.

Downton went on to Bantam, and there died in 1616, as his old chief Sir Henry Middleton had done not long before. In his forgotten grave lies & man starched and square-toed, touched with absurdities such as might grace a Sir Roger de Coverley or Baron of Bradwardine, but a fine seaman, a loyal servant of the Company, and a most undoubted worker on the foundations of the Empire in India. DAVID HANNAY.

TO AMARNATH AND GANGABAL.-GANGABAL.

BY EDMUND CANDLER.

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THE path from Amarnath to Baltal in the Sind valley by which we were to reach Gangabal, six marches distant, was blocked. The snow bridges were broken, as we had expected. But to turn back was unthinkable. There was nothing for it but to climb the ridge behind the cave and drop down into Ladakh, and thence over the Zoji-la into Kashmir again. It was simple pass about 14,500 feet, which, as we knew, had been often traversed before. It offered no difficulties, but the Kashmir coolie is a timid creature, and it is never easy to lead him off the track, much less over untrodden snow. We had meant to return to our camp at Panjitarni from Amarnath, but early in the morning we sent our servants back to bring our tents on to the cave. The coolies had been fractious; they had got wind of our move and attacked Phillips' shikari. So when we returned to Amarnath in the evening we were relieved to see the white canvas pitched beneath us on the uneven ground at the mouth of the

cave.

We expected trouble in the morning, but we were not prepared for what happened. When the coolies discovered that we were set on crossing the pass, they all sat down in a ring and cried. Real sobs

shook these robust men; they were able to conjure up real tears, which fell upon their beards and manly bosoms,twenty-four strong men in a ring, each sitting on a stone, and sniffling and whimpering, "I will not go."

It was the first time we had seen men of sinew weep. We laughed, and then we felt ashamed; there was vicarious humiliation in the sight. If a Martian had come upon us then, he would have put us all down in the same genus, perhaps the same species, Man.

However, they went on with a little encouragement, and a little prodding, delicate but firm, to stiffen it. Phillips led the first man by the hand, and I followed the last with my khud-stick laid gently against the small of his back. In a few hours they were laughing as they watched us glissade down. In the evening they went off pleased with their baksheesh, and shouting and singing, and thinking themselves great bahadurs.

The pass took us into Ladakh, and we struck the famous Leh road a few miles below the Zoji-la. I had never seen Ladakh or the road before, but I knew them both. I knew the road, because every book of Central Asian travel describes it and the author's rapture when he descends into the flowery margs of Kashmir.

And I knew the country, because the scenery is that of the dry land beyond the watershed, where the rainfall is less than six inches in the year. You cross into it over all the passes to the north. One day Nature is gloriously attired; the next she is stripped bare. Or it may be a matter of a few hours. You zigzag up through the forest to the juniper scrub and dwarf rhododendrons. A few straggling birches lead a forlorn - hope behind you, beyond the tree-line; the flowers carpet the earth as thickly, but they become smaller and brighter. The only sounds of life that break the stillness are the warning pipe of the marmot and the shrill resentful

cry of the raven and the chough. You pass a little ice and the tail of a moraine. moraine. Shelves of snow scored by falling rock slope down to the path. Then after many false summits you reach a gap in the rock, and look down on the bare ribs of the earth over a sheet of snow and green and grey glacier.

Descend to ten or eleven thousand feet and you are in a treeless world, in the reek of hot fennel and wormwood. The lower slopes of the hills are flecked with green and yellow where the fennel is the fennel is sheltered or parched by the sun. The sky is an intense blue; the heat and glare are fierce; a gale is tearing down the valley; the roar of the torrent is always in your ears. Side valleys reveal hidden glacier worlds. The path is overhung with coloured crags,

grouped always in some new, wild, haphazard, architectural design, grand in its scorn of symmetry, walls of cliff scored and charactered all over, twisted turrets, splintered buttresses running down into the smooth mammæ of the grazing slopes. And this rocky wilderness repeats itself, I believe, with infinite variety in monotony, to the great plateaus and the ranges beyond, yielding nothing to Pan save patches of willows and poplars and walnuts, the haunts of magpies and hoopooes, bordering fields of stunted barley.

There are oases of kinds but no real forest again, save perhaps the Siberian pines between Panji or Gantsa or Baltal and the Arctic sea.

I had no wish to go far along the road and turn back. I felt that if I made seven marches down the valley I must go right through to Kashgar and Yarkand, under the hanging snows of Karakoram, until I heard the clank of chains and couplings on the Russian line.

The pastoral bias would not allow us farther than Dras. Four days was enough to burn the valley into my mind, and the pleasure of these marches was more of the kind one gets from revisiting old haunts than from exploring an unfamiliar country.

I lit my pipe in the shelter of a dâk-runner's hut. There was a yak-dung fire in the corner, and the fumes mixed with the tobacco smoke translated me physically to Tibet, as only smells can. Shut eyes

and the blend of Craven and argol will be a recipe for that land with many. They act like the magic carpet of Prince Hussain.

Then I sat in the one clump of willows, less than thirty stunted trees, between the Zoji-la and Dras, and watched the people go by. A Ladaki came along the road, and his walk called up a hundred buried memories. How many people had I seen coming towards me like that?-Arabs and Tibetans, generally with the heat-haze dancing over them. I may have associated the gait subconsciously with the landscape without giving it any particular thought, but it only then struck me how differently people walk in hot, dry, desert countries, especially in these barren plateaus ringed in with mountains. And not men only, but yaks and horses, donkeys and sheep.

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A Yarkandi caravan owed: it was an hour coming and passing out of sight, and I noticed the same slow, picturesque gait, like ants in procession, as they passed in the thin hot air between the mountains which preclude any vagary from the path.

There was an intentness and sureness about every human figure which gave them a kind of dignity even in a shamble. The yaks on a distant hillside changing their pasture had the same air. There is no chance or alternative in these bleak lands. No one starts for one place and goes to another. No one drifts or is detached from his purpose. No one hurries or

No one

has to be in time. "goes for a walk." Places are too far off, the standard of time is too vague for men to stride or run. That caravan may have been fifty days on the road from Yarkand. Ten days more or less is of small account. There is certainty only in fulfilment.

I often think it is the great distance of places from one another in bleak countries as much as the climate that gives the Asiatic his air of fatalism and repose. You see it more in the north of India and beyond the Himalayas than in the teeming cities of Madras and Bengal, where people live under a strain, and life has become as complex and faces as anxious and self-conscious as in the West.

At Dras we looked in at the serai. There were thirty Yarkandi pilgrims there bound for Mecca by the Punjab and Bombay,-tall, robust men in chogas of white or butcher-blue, wearing fur - rimmed caps, peaceful, puckered, weatherbeaten faces, prominent cheekbones, Gallic beards, complexion a brick-dust colour. The women were cooking in a corner of the yard, and hid their red faces. There was something bracing about these men after Amarnath; the West has more in common with the Haji than with the Sadhu. Theirs is an ampler pilgrimage, a wider horizon, a more direct, imperious call, breathing through the salt, the mountain, and the desert air. There is nothing dark or secret or mysterious in it. It is

a clarion note calling to open spaces, earth the floor and heaven the roof, as free of lurking mystery as the mosque of dark images, oblique symbols, ambiguous interpretations.

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We turned back from Dras over the Zoji. It is the deepest depression in the main barrier of the Himalayas for hundreds of miles along the frontier, and it is not like anything one generally associates with pass. You might cross it without noticing it. The water, trickling from a fissure in the rock, takes two courses; above and below, the snow bridges have a scarcely perceptible incline. But the drop from the bleak land has been the theme of many rhapsodies. We, too, had had our surfeit of barrenness; we were all for pastoral Kashmir. We wanted to camp in a mountain garden again, and dine under the stars by a blaze as big as a king's pyre.

rabbits and tigers and devils and elephants and swans with the shadow of his hands. I wondered if, in all its two thousand years, any one else had played with shadows on the wall.

It is a stiff hot climb up to Gangabal. There is no ascent so hot or long or steep on the road to Amarnath, but the pilgrims' sufferings are over in a day. You pass from walnut to birch and juniper and beyond the tree-line in a few hours, and you are zigzagging up among the low long-needled pines without a break for four thousand feet.

I have always had a dislike for these trees, and never asked myself or understood why until I stood on the burnt slope of Haramokh and looked at the serried mast forest across the valley. They are a low pedestrian growth. They hang about cantonments and drop their cones on galvanised iron roofs. Shrieking engines belch their smoke into them; vulgar people picnic under them. They exhale the spirit of the foothills. A niggard, unaspiring crew, pines in name only, the letter without the spirit. You may wander among them all day and never be out of sight of ugly useful things.

We went down the Sind valley and turned up the Kanknai under Haramokh, and in five days we were camping by the grey, old, lichened, lizard-haunted ruins of Wangat, which stand in groves beside the maize and the waving fields of balsam and the yellowing elder,-shrines dedicated to some old forgotten god. An owl tu-whooted to us from the trefoiled arch as we drank our soup. After dinner we went inside and lighted a small fire on the stones. The sweet scent of burning pine - wood mingled with the musty old smell tains give me of tombs, and Phillips made pines, pices and

Every one loves the dear, old, homely wayside trees, the willow and elm and poplar and walnut, that know the same gods as the hearth and the byre and the thatched barn; but in the mounthose brave

abies, the

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