Travels in Lada K, Tartary, and Kashmir (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ever, rapidly left us as the healthful breezes of the green hill-side, purer, cooler, and more bracing at every successive zig-zag of the precipitous ascent, fanned our cheeks. What a road it was Stairs ? Well, they might have been stairs once upon a time, THE ROAD TO MOSCOW. planned by Titans when " children of a larger growth" had their being, and finished off and utterly done for by ages of snow-meltings, torrent-rushings, and that " constant drippingof water which," we are told, " doth wear away the hardest stone;" but it was a road A road ? It was the road?the high road, to?to?to Moscow Hien que $a And could we have foreseen and profited by another week's experience of hill- travelling, we should have called it "a fair mountain road " But I try, reader, to give you my impressions of Himalayan travel as they first struck me. "We reached the summit without an accident, thanks mainly to the activity of our ponies. I congratulated myself during the ascent that none were there to see, for anything more derogatory to the dignity of a lord of the creation, more humiliating to one's amour propre, than to be dragged up a precipice pendant to the tail of a shaggy mountain pony, is difficult to conceive. For further particulars I refer the reader to the accompanying sketch. We reached our tents about two hours before nightfall; they were pitched close to a large and tolerably well-built village, called Dilass. Our photographer, who, for artistic purposes, had preceded us by some hours, was there to receive us, and had caused, so he said, a fatted lamb to be killed for our evening meal. The flesh was lean, indisputably, and the flavour somewhat rank? suggestive of kid of goat (if kid it was), or rather of a patriarch of that hirsute flock. We were too hungry for sev...