The village of Muglib consists of three wretched huts, and its twelve inhabitants cultivate barley and peas. The barley harvest was expected in ten days, but the peas were still in full blossom, and would not be ripe before the frosts set in. They are then used as horse fodder while they are still soft and green. I asked some Muglib men what they did in winter. “Sleep and freeze,” they answered.
Next morning the sun had not risen when a shouting and jingling, loud voices, and the stamping and neighing of horses woke me out of sleep—the heavy cavalry was marching off under the command of Muhamed Isa. Then the puppies discovered that my bed was a grand playground, and left me no more peace. Manuel’s fire in the kitchen began to crackle, and a fragrant steam gave notice that there were mutton cutlets for breakfast. I was accustomed to camp life, but I had never been so comfortable before and had never had so large and perfect a caravan.
Beyond the village we crossed the brook six times; it is quite small, and seems always to contain the same amount of water, for it comes from a small lake, where I had encamped on the eastern shore in December 1901. Now we followed the northern shore over many very difficult mountain spurs of black schist and quartzite; the ground is covered with gravel, sometimes with small patches of coarse grass, and then again is very sandy. Sometimes torrents of clear water gush down from the mountains, where huge fan-shaped cones of dejection descend from the mouths of ravines to the valley.
A heap of stones bedecked with flags and a mani mark the point of hydrographical importance, which is the watershed between the Panggong-tso and the Indian Ocean; here the height is 14,196 feet. From this point the valley descends slowly to the lake, and we ride in the channel through which at one time it discharged itself into the Shyok and Indus.
Now, the Panggong-tso is cut off from the Indus and consequently contains salt water. Behind a spur on the right side of the valley which hides the view, the western extremity of the lake peeped out, and a few minutes later a grand panorama unfolded itself before us; the great bluish-green lake between its colossal cliffs. Five years before I had skirted its northern shore with my camels, my old sturdy veterans, which caused so much excitement in Ladak that there I was still called the Camel Lord.
Just where the Pobrang river enters, forming a flat delta full of lagoons, we halted for a while to control our determination of heights by a boiling-point observation, and then rode along the river, which in 1901 was choked up with drifted sand, but was now full of water. When the drainage water fails in winter, the bed is at once filled up with sand, but the dunes are swept away again as soon as the spring flood sets in.
Lukkong is a small village with a couple of stone huts, a field of barley, a chhorten, a meadow, and a stunted mountain poplar. From this place the road runs north and north-east through the broad pebble-strewn valley, where we have a foretaste of the flatter conformation of the Tibetan plateau. We are in a region which has no drainage to the sea; we have already crossed three important thresholds, the Zoji-la, the Chang-la, and, to-day, the small Panggong Pass, but we have still two great passes in front of us before we finally enter the wide expanses of the tableland. Beyond the first we must again descend to the basin of the Indus, behind the second lies an enclosed hydrographical area which we must traverse in order to reach the country draining to the ocean through the upper valleys of the Brahmaputra.
From a small pass with a few stone cairns we had a surprising view over a valley which ran parallel to the one we had just travelled through, and was full of green meadows. Many tents and camp-fires were seen above and below the village Pobrang, and the meadow land was dotted over with dark caravan animals, for mine was not the only party that was paying Pobrang a flying visit: an English shikari, too, was there, a Mr. Lucas Tooth, who had been hunting in the mountains and was very well pleased with his collection of antelope horns. We talked in my tent till midnight, and he was the last European I saw for a space of more than two years.
