On April 6th a reconnaissance in force was made by Captain Borrodaile to Gasht, twelve miles distant; the two guns and one hundred and twenty of the pioneers taking part in the movement. Gasht was reached without opposition, and the villages on the route were found almost deserted, but Captain Borrodaile's troops were able to seize some thirty inhabitants and twelve ponies to serve for transport purposes. Captain Borrodaile returned to Laspur the same night, and he then found Colonel Kelly with Lieutenant Beynon, his staff-officer, and about fifty levies had crossed the pass and arrived in Laspur. On the 7th the troops rested and prepared for an advance on the following day. On the 8th the force reached Gasht unopposed, and a small reconnaissance in the evening showed that the enemy were occupying a strong position across the valley at a place called Chokalwat, a few miles below. This position Colonel Kelly decided to attack the next morning. The Chokalwat position is one of great natural strength, and of that order which is generally described as impregnable. Any one looking at it would say that here a hundred men could keep a whole army at bay. On each side of the valley mountains tower up thousands of feet in rugged precipices; a river flows along it, and the only road leads either along the bottom of a stone-shoot, down which the enemy from above could hurl rocks on any force passing beneath; or else over the river and by a zigzag path up some cliffs, the edges of which the enemy had lined with sangars or stone breastworks. At accessible points on the mountain sides the enemy had also constructed these breastworks, and if the Chitralis were determined to offer Colonel Kelly at all a resolute opposition, he might have been brought to a standstill here at his first contact with the enemy, and his main object of affording speedy relief to the garrison in Chitral would be frustrated. In the Hunza campaign of 1891, our troops had been kept at bay for nearly a fortnight in just such another position. The Hunza men were few of them armed with rifles, while the Chitralis had numbers of breech-loaders, and it was not difficult to imagine that a check might here be offered to the relief force, and a check, anything else indeed but complete success, would have involved the British in most serious trouble, and might have caused the people all along the lengthy line of communications to show hostility.