I often noticed, when sending an old man back for the remainder of his load, that some youngster who had brought his whole load across would volunteer to bring the remainder of the old man's, and, of course, I was only too glad to let him. We found the young men easy to manage, and the old men were let down lightly; it was the middle-aged man, full of strength and his own importance, who sometimes tried to raise objections, but it was getting late, and no time for fooling, so we drove our arguments home with a gun butt, and the man obeyed. The rearguard crossed in the dark, and by nine o'clock I was able to report to Colonel Kelly that everybody had arrived in camp, just as dinner was ready. I didn't turn in till late that night, as I was on duty, and had to go scrambling round the pickets; even at that late hour I saw many men still cooking, probably preparing food for the next day. As our supplies were now reduced to less than three days, our march the next morning was ordered for 10 A.M., in order to allow foraging parties to go out at daybreak to scoop in anything they could find. In the meantime, I sent some levies forward to the next village to reconnoitre. The foraging parties did not bring in much, but in our case every little was of importance, and by 10 A.M. we started. Our front in camp had been protected by a deep nullah; it took some time getting across this. By the time we cleared the village, we met our returning scouts, who reported having seen the enemy in the village of Mori, and reported their strength as some one hundred men on foot, and about twenty horsemen. So we all cheered up at the chance of a fight. The road now dropped down to the river bed, and ran along the foot of some cliffs three or four hundred feet sheer above the roadway; there was about a mile of this, and then two miles of narrow path along the face of steep shale slopes and cliff face high above the river. Any force once caught in this place could be cut off to a man. The path was so narrow that in many places the gun ponies could not have turned round.