The fort of Shigar is close to the mountains on the east side of the valley, where a considerable stream makes its exit from them. By this stream, Mr. Vigne ascended to a pass on the high range to the eastward, and descended upon the Shayuk at the village of Braghar. Where it terminates in the Shigar plain, this valley is for a few hundred yards very narrow; but a little above its entrance it widens considerably, and the flanks of the mountains are covered with a great accumulation of the alluvial deposits, clinging to the face of the rocks on both sides, certainly as high as a thousand feet above the stream. The beds were sometimes, but rarely, stratified, and were very variable in appearance. Coarse conglomerates, at one time with angular boulders, at others, with rounded stones, alternated with coarse and fine sand and finely laminated clays. No fossils of any kind were observed.
In summer, the discharge of the Shigar river, which descends from the snowy masses of the Muztagh or Kouen-lun, must be immense, as prodigious glaciers descend very low among the valleys of its different branches. Up one of the streams a practicable road exists towards Yarkand over an enormous glacier. I met with one or two people at Iskardo who had traversed it; but it is now not at all frequented, being very unsafe, in consequence of the marauding propensities of the wild Mahommedan tribes who inhabited the Hunza valley. It was described to me as an exceedingly difficult road, lying for several days over the surface of the glacier.
[Sidenote: DEPARTURE FROM ISKARDO. _April, 1848._]
On the 31st of March, I left Iskardo for the last time. It was expected that the pass between Dras and Kashmir would be easily accessible by the time I should reach it. My road as far as Dras was the same as that along which I had twice travelled in December, and, except from the indications of returning spring, was much the same as it had then been. The crops of wheat and barley in the fields in the Iskardo plain were an inch or two high, the buds of the apricot were just beginning to swell, and the willows had almost expanded their flowers.
At Gol and Nar, where the valley is narrow and the heat therefore more concentrated, the corn was considerably further advanced, and in some of the apricot flowers the petals had begun to expand. Wild flowers had also begun to vegetate: a violet was in flower on the banks of streamlets, as well as a _Primula_ and an _Androsace_. Above Parkuta, again, the season was more backward. Large snow-banks, which had descended in avalanches, still remained in all the larger furrows on the mountain-sides. The river had been discoloured since the day I left Iskardo, and on the 4th of April, the day I reached Kartash, it became very much so, and was said to be rising rapidly.