It was a cold march as we crunched along through the snow, in spite of the fact that the sun was shining brightly. We were at an altitude of over sixteen thousand feet, and had to make long detours, for the road was in places blocked or rendered unsafe by the snow. In some of the detours where there was no path, we scrambled up and down terrifying slopes. My saddle, a hunting one, could not be kept in place, and we had to extemporize a breast-plate with string. In one ravine where we halted, trying to find a way out, there was a sudden crack and a splash. We had stopped over a stream crusted with ice and covered with snow, and the horse of one of the soldiers went through. The stream, however, was shallow, and only the man’s feet were wetted. There was a laugh as he urged his horse out. We descended from the region of snow into valleys where the air quivered with heat, and one’s face was nearly blistered. In one, where we stopped for lunch, I put a clinical thermometer for a moment against my coat sleeve. The mercury shot up to the top at once. I was glad when we moved on again. We passed a spring bubbling up near the road, whose waters were impregnated with iron, the ground all round being stained brown. Jan Mahomed said the water contained copper and was poisonous. I remember one narrow but wild rocky ravine, with a river foaming and roaring down it. The road ran along a few yards above the water. There was a natural bridge of rock, over which the road ran, and just beyond, a waterfall of some depth, where, at the bottom of the fall, the water rushed under an arch of rock and was lost to sight. It reappeared, I was told, in a valley about two miles off, and they said His Highness the Amîr one day, when travelling by, offered a prize of a hundred rupees to the man who would plunge in and explore the underground river. A duck had been put in and had reappeared alive in the valley. A soldier undertook the adventure at once, and was preparing for his perilous journey when the Amîr forbad it. His Highness said, “If he is drowned I lose a man of courage, and if he succeed what gain is there? Give him the rupees.” [Sidenote: Camp in the Bamian Valley.] We were now about ninety miles from Kabul. For the first forty miles we travelled due west, after that north-west, till we entered the ravine I spoke of, which led nearly due north. As we rode on, the ravine descended and opened into a large and very fertile valley. The mountain at the west of the gorge was red in colour, quite different from those we had been travelling among. Looking up with some interest at it, I distinguished battlemented walls and towers leading up the mountain, and, at the top, clusters of ruined houses and walls. There was no sign of life. The city was deserted. They told me the place was called Zohàk-i-Marhan, and was built a thousand years ago (“hazar sol”) by the Emperor Alexander (“Sekunder”).