KASHMIR AND THE HIMALAYAS 103

Chitral. The unexplored mountain wildernesses of Tangir
and Darél (lying west of Gilgit and bordering the plains
of Swat) are still absolutely independent. We know little
about them. The same may be said of those districts of
the Indus basin which include Bunér and the hills south
of that valley. Over a great part of Swat and Bajaor,
together with a portion of the Mohmand districts, we
have lately extended a certain amount of political control
with the object of preserving our right of way from the
plains of Peshawur to Chitral; but it is an influence which
has to be supported by force of arms, although it aims
only at securing the good-will of the local chiefs in Swat,
Bajaor, and Dir. Chitral and Gilgit are important to us
in so far as they serve as outposts from which we may
keep watch over certain northern gateways of the Trans-Himalaya,
 and to afford us opportunity of influencing the
border tribes in their neighbourhood. Otherwise the vast
wilderness of snow-clad mountains which encloses them,
intersected by narrow valleys buried beneath overhanging
masses of cliff and crag (too narrow to do more than
support a scanty and hardy population of mountaineers),
is too difficult of access, and too remote from civilised
centres, to be a source of anything but periodical embarrassment.

Until we made a road to Gilgit the mountain tracks
to that place were well-nigh impassable ; beyond Chitral
and Gilgit these tracks still retain their primitive simplicity
—a simplicity which only occasionally admits of the passing
to and fro of those mountaineers who habitually use them.
For throughout all this region the rigours of an eightmonths’
 winter binds the land in an iron grip, and when
these passes are spoken of as “ practicable,” the term is
anderstood to be strictly limited to four months of the
year, intervening between 1st June and 31st October.
During these four months, indeed, the mountain floods
are loosened, and every ridge and fold in the hills
despatches its rivulet of snow-fed water to swell the
torrents in the river beds. In June the winter covering
of snow is withdrawn from the slopes about the passes,