Bottom.  What beard were I best to play it in?

  Quince.  Why, what you will.

  Bottom.  I will discharge it in either your straw-coloured beard, your
  orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your
  French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow

Midsummer Night’s Dream,

Act I. Sc. 2.

  “What coloured beard comes next by the window?”

  “A black man’s, I think.”

  “I think a red:  for that is most in fashion.”

RAM ALLY.

Truly, until I beheld that tax-gatherer of the Orient, I had no idea that the “purple-in-grain” beard existed outside a poet’s fancy!

The road took us along the left bank of the river, whose soil-stained waters churned their way through a wild and rocky gorge.  On our left the mountain rose bare and steep, fringed with a few straggling bushes, and here and there a clinging patch of rose-coloured primula.  Part of the conglomerate cliff had come down and obliterated the road, but a party of coolies was busily at work, and, after about an hour’s delay, we triumphantly bumped our way past.

The road now led steadily upward, leaving an ever-increasing slope (or khud) between it and the river, until it attained a height of over a thousand feet, when, turning to the left, it swung over the watershed, and began to descend into the valley of the Kishenganga.  Through the haze we could make out Domel, our goal, lying far below, and then the old Sikh fort of Musafferabad.

The road was so encumbered with rock-falls that we walked the greater part of it, until we came to the new bridge over the Kishenganga, whose dark red waters rush into the Jhelum about a mile below.

Here was Musafferabad, the whole place a confused jumble of wheeled traffic caught up by the big landslip in front.  Passing, amid the chatter and clamour of men and beasts, through the medley of bullock-carts and ekkas that crowded every available space, we hauled the carriage through the bed of a watercourse whose bridge was broken.  Up over the prostrate trunk of a fallen tree we regained the road, to find ourselves in front of the big landslip of which we had been warned.  It consisted of some thousands of tons of dark red mud and loose boulders, and it blocked the road for fully a couple of hundred yards.

A large and energetic swarm of coolies was busily engaged in “tidying up.”  This was apparently to be achieved by means of shovels, each little shovel worked by two men—­one to shovel, and the other to assist in raising it when full by means of a little rope round the head.  This labour had to be lubricated by much conversation.

It seemed upon the whole unlikely that a path could be made for a considerable time, so we lunched peacefully in the carriage, a pair of extremely friendly crows assisting at the feast, and then, leaving our landau to follow as best it might, we walked into Domel, crossing the Jhelum by a fine bridge.