The fort of Gilgit Dardistan Kashmir 1860













The fort of Gilgit is the Maharaja's chief stronghold in Dardistan. It has been at different times taken, destroyed, rebuilt, added to, and altered. In 1870, when. The central part with the high towers (one of them loftier than the rest) was built by the ruler Gaur Rahman during his second reign in Gilgit, when the Maharajah Gulab Singh's troops had been for a , time dispossessed of it; this was built in the Dard style, of a wooden framework for the wall, filled in with stones ; it was really a strong work for the country. 
Kashmiri Muslims are generally from the Dard tribe, having unique features and muscular body and shape. 
 The Dard people, when talking among themselves in their own language, the sound of the name of the country we have come to seemed to my  ear such as would properly be represented  by the spelling Gilgit. But all people of other races  who have had  occasion to use the  name-Kashmiris,  Sikhs, Dogras, and  Europeans have caught the  sound as Gilgit, and used this form until it has become so much known that  it  would be in convenient, not to say useless, for me to attempt to  change the name.
 The district of Gilgit consists of the lower part of the valley of a river tributary to the Indus, which, rising in the mountains that bound Badakhshan and Chitral, flows south-eastward until it falls into the great  river, a little above Ghizer River.  The length of the course of this Gigit River  is 120  miles, which are  thus divided,-Yasin  in­cludes a length of 60 miles, Punial of 25 miles, and Gilgit of 35 miles.  Yasin is beyond the Maharajah of Kashmir's boundary ;  
The lower part of the valley is from one to three miles wide, and is bounded on each side by steep rocky moun­tains ,  the valley itself contains stony alluvial plateaus the greater part of whose area is arid and barren, but in In the spring of 1871 a severe earthquake threw down a considerable portion of the fort, and it has now, I believe, been rebuilt on a better plan Gilgit, by my reckoning, is 4800 feet above the sea.
 
Its climate is warm and dry, drier than that of Astor, and snow seldom falls in the valley. 
Gold is washed from the river-gravels, as in many other parts of the Indus basin ; here it is in coarser grains than  have seen elsewhere, and the return for the labour of washing is somewhat better. 
 It would very likely repay working on a larger scale than that now followed. In this valley (as in other countries that we shall come
to) the contrast is great and sudden between the cultivated space, bearing good crops and various fruit-trees, and the ground beyond, which is bare and stony, the vegetation being closely limited by the supply of water for irrigation; nothing grows on the plain without its aid. Not only is the plain bare, but the mountains also are 
naked, of rock or loose stones without vegetation. Only at the summit of the cliff that rears its head above Gilgit
 It would very likely repay working on a larger scale than that now followed. In this valley (as in other countries that we shall come to) the contrast is great and sudden between the cultivated space, bearing good crops and various fruit-trees, and the ground beyond, which is bare and stony, the vegetation being closely limited by the supply of water for irrigation; nothing grows on the plain without its aid. Not only is the plain bare, but the mountains also are naked, of rock or loose stones without vegetation. Only at the summit of the cliff that rears its head above Gilgit

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