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 Pindi, while the Colonel returned up the Jhelum for more shooting before rejoining his wife at Bandipur.

The march of about thirteen miles from Kitardaji to Baramula is fine—­the views of Nanga Parbat in the early hours, before the sun’s full strength cast a golden glow over the distance, were magnificent, and long we lingered upon the last ridge, gazing over the great valley, ringed with its guardian mountains, ere we sadly turned our backs for the last time on the scene, and wended our way downward to Baramula and our boats.

Kashmir seems to be as difficult to get out of as to get into!  What was our amazement and disgust to find neither landau nor ekkas, nor, apparently, any chance of getting them!