for the last third of the way:  from the roof at the farther end, where the cave is not so high as at the entrance, a congeries of icicles was seen to hang; and in a corner on the right, completely sheltered from the rays of the sun, there was a large mass of the same material.  It was a fine forenoon in July, and all was in a state of thaw, the icicles dropping water, and the floor of ice covered with a thin layer of water; while the thermometer in all parts of the cave stood at zero of Reaumur’s scale.  The rock is compact unstratified limestone, in which so many of the famous caverns of the world are found.

The Cave of Yeermalik, in Koondooz[101]

In the year 1840, Captain Burslem, of the 13th Light Infantry, made an expedition from Cabul to the North-west, accompanied by Lieutenant Sturt of the Bengal Engineers, who was afterwards killed in the terrible pass where Lady Sale, whose daughter he had married, was shot through the arm.

After crossing the high and wild pass of Karakotul (10,500 feet), these travellers reached the romantic glen of the Doaub, which lies at the foot of the pass, and is surrounded on all sides by lofty mountains.  Here they were hospitably entertained by Shah Pursund Khan, the chief of the small territory, and their curiosity was roused by the account given by an old moollah of a cavern seven miles off, which the Shah strongly advised them not to attempt to visit, for the Sheitan (the devil), whose ordinary place of abode it was, never allowed a stranger to return from its recesses.  The moollah, however, scouted this idea, on the ground that it was much too cold for such an inhabitant; and the Shah eventually agreed to accompany them to the cave with a band of his followers.

As they rode through long and rich grass, following the course of a gentle stream, and tormented by swarms of forest flies, or blood-suckers, the Shah informed them that he had once endeavoured to explore the cave, and had already penetrated to a considerable distance, when he came upon the fresh prints of a naked foot, with an extraordinary impression by their side, which he suspected to be the foot of Sheitan himself, and so he beat a precipitate retreat.  The moollah told them that there was a large number of skeletons in the cave, the remains of 700 men who took refuge there during the invasion of Genghis Khan, with their wives and families, and defended themselves so stoutly, that, after trying in vain the means by which the M’Leods were destroyed in barbarous times, and the opponents of French progress in Algeria in times less remote, the invader built them in with huge natural blocks of stone, and left them to die of hunger.