them of their best fowls, but requisitioned all manner of things in
my name, though I scrupulously and personally paid for everything,
beating the people with his scabbarded sword if they showed any
intention of standing upon their rights. Then I found that my clever
factotum, not content with the legitimate 'squeeze' of ten per cent.,
was charging me double price for everything and paying the sellers
only half the actual price, this legerdemain being perpetrated in my
presence. He also by threats got back from the coolies half their
day's wages after I had paid them, received money for barley for
Gyalpo, and never bought it, a fact brought to light by the growing
feebleness of the horse, and cheated in all sorts of mean and
plausible ways, though I paid him exceptionally high wages, and was
prepared to 'wink' at a moderate amount of dishonesty, so long as it
affected only myself. It has a lowering influence upon one to live
in a fog of lies and fraud, and the attempt to checkmate a fraudulent
Asiatic ends in extreme discomfiture.

I left Sonamarg late on a lovely afternoon for a short march through
forest-skirted alpine meadows to Baltal, the last camping-ground in
Kashmir, a grassy valley at the foot of the Zoji La, the first of
three gigantic steps by which the lofty plateaux of Central Asia are
attained. On the road a large affluent of the Sind, which tumbles
down a pine-hung gorge in broad sheets of foam, has to be crossed.
My seis, a rogue, was either half-witted or pretended to be so, and,
in spite of orders to the contrary, led Gyalpo upon a bridge at a
considerable height, formed of two poles with flat pieces of stone
laid loosely over them not more than a foot broad. As the horse
reached the middle, the structure gave a sort of turn, there was a
vision of hoofs in air and a gleam of scarlet, and Gyalpo, the hope
of the next four months, after rolling over more than once, vanished