Excerpt from Chitral: The Story of a Minor Siege

The dominant note of Chitral is bigness combined- with desolation, vast silent mountains cloaked in eternal snow, wild glacier-born torrents, cruel precipices, and pastureless hillsides where the ibex and the markhor find a precarious subsistence. It takes time for the mind to recover from the depression which the stillness and melancholy of the giant landscape at first compel. All colour is purged away by the sun-glare, and no birds sing. Life is represented by great eagles and vultures, circling slowly or poised aloft, and by the straight business-like flight of the hawk. The dull, ceaseless roar of the distant river changes, whenever you listen fixedly, to a sound as of supernatural voices shrieking in agony, but too remote for human sympathy.

Enclosed in such a mighty frame the space for human life and action seems almost microscopic, so small is the spot it occupies, so completely is it lost in its surroundings. It consists of tiny fan-shaped oases of cultivation on soil deposited by mountain streams, just before they noisily hurl themselves into a main river. These torrents are the tutelary deities as well as the creators of the village holdings, for they provide life and nourishment, through little canals, to the fields, which would otherwise vanish under the rainless sky.

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