gh richly cultivated hollows and past well-wooded
hills, where the dark silver firs and the deodars were lit up by splashes
of scarlet and orange, and the deciduous sumach and thorn-bushes hung out
their autumn flags. Walnuts--the trees in many places turning yellow--were
being gathered into heaps, and the apple trees, reddening in the autumn
glow, hung heavy with abundant fruit.

Turning into a narrow gorge, where the trees overhung the path and shaded
the wanderer with many an interlaced bough; where ferns grew in great
green clumps, and the friendly magpies chattered in the luminous shade, I
hurried on, having stayed behind the others to sketch. Up and up, till
only pines waved over me, and the track, leading along the edge of a deep
khud, opened out at last upon a plateau, hot and sunlit; here an
entrancing panorama of Nanga Parbat and the whole range of mountains round
Haramok caused me to stop "at gaze" until a mundane desire for breakfast
sent me scurrying down the dusty and slippery descent to Larch, where I
found, as I had hoped, the rest of the party assembled expectant around
the tiffin basket, while the necromancer, Sabz Ali, had just succeeded in
producing the most delightful stew, omelette, and coffee from the usual
native toy kitchen, made, apparently, in a few minutes with a couple of
stones and a dab of mud!

It has been an unfailing marvel to us how, in storm or calm, rain or fine,
the native cook seems always able to produce a hot meal with such
apparently inadequate materials as he has at his command. Give him a fire
in the open, screened by stones and a mud wall, a _batterie de cuisine_
limited to one or two war-worn "degchies," and let him have a village fowl
and half-a-dozen tiny eggs, and he will in due time serve up, with modest
pride, a most excellent repast.

The remaining half of our twelve-mile march lay along a continually rising
track, which finally brought us to Kitardaji, a cosy pine-built hut,
perched upon a hill clothed with deodars, at the foot of which ran the
inevitable stream.

This, alas! is our last Kashmir camping-ground, and it is one of the most
charming of all.

At 8.15 this morning we bade farewell to Kitardaji. We had got up before
dawn to see the sunrise, but afterwards took things leisurely, as the
march is short to Baramula, and our boats were to be in waiting there, and
we had made all arrangements for a landau and ekkas to be in readiness to
take us down to Rawal