impassable. The path turns steeply up its left bank for several hundred feet. As it ascends, an open plain is reached from which a magnificent view is obtained to the south-east up the Shingshal valley, across the Yazghil glacier, over the snout of the Khurdopin glacier, and beyond as far as the main Karakoram range...still ascending the path grows narrower and more difficult at every step. Now it strikes across slipping shingle slopes which, a few feet below, end in a precipice; here and there it leads over a single gnarled tree-branch bridging a seamless cliff, now it ascends and now descends a fragile wooden staircase, and finally, after reaching a height of 12,600 feet, plunges 1,500 feet over steep rock-faces to the very edge of the Tang stream. The gorge here is but 15 yards wide, a mere sunless rift in the black rock. Scrambling over and under great boulders we forded the torrent fourteen times in the next mile, and as often again a sheath of ice across two sunken rocks presented the alternative of a slippery bridge. Suddenly the gorge widens to 60 paces. On either side rise em­battled walls of gravel.....The track was not easy; now it traversed a rotten cliff and now crossed a deep chasm by a fragile bridge.....and climb­ing 1,000 feet emerged upon a broad shelving plain over which we trudged for 2 or 3 miles till we came to a deep ravine at the edge of which was the cairn that marked the westerly point reached by Captain Younghusband. Just beyond was Shuijerab, where he camped.”[1]

Coming from the opposite direction, Shipton remarked, that “these terraces were more imposing than anything we had seen on the northern watershed…the most fantastic ravine carved out of these alluvial deposits by a side stream.” And that without an impressive path driven through it by the locals, “it would have presented an unsurmountable obstacle. As it was, a stairway had been engineered through it with astonishing skill, and it was now an easy matter to descend the 1.500 feet into this fearsome gorge….The pioneers of the route must have had a remarkable determination, for anything less promising than the way they had chosen must be hard to imagine….the gorge below us was so bad that not even the ingenuity of the natives, with hundreds of years at their disposal, had been able to construct a way through while the river was at its summer level.”[2]

Three years earlier than Cockerill, Francis Younghusband noticed further upstream: “The valley we were in soon narrowed to a precipitous gorge….impracticable for ponies and even very difficult for men.”[3] From here, Younghusband returned to Shimshal Pass and we follow his footsteps past the “Steep sided barren valley of Shuijerab”[4] to reach the famous Shimshal Pass.

Shimshal Pass, watershed of the Mustagh Range, between Central Asia and the Indian plains starting point for the feared and famous raids of the Hunza Kingdom on caravans passing by on the Leh-Yarkand route, was first discovered for the western world by Francis Younghusband, who describes the pass for which he had been seeking during so many weeks: “The pass which is a pamir….a nearly level plain of very shallow and wide through between high mountains on each side….there were two small lakes”, further “This Shimshal Pass forms one of those remarkable depressions which are here and there met with in these mountains...There where patches of good grass both here and on the flat surface of the pass, but no trees and only low dwarf bushes.”[5]

Shipton described his arrival at Shimshal Pass: “I sat for a long time on the crest of the pass, cought up in the magic of the view.... The view in every direction of this plain were magnificent. The limestone peaks to the south-west rose sheer out of a flat glacier....in contrast to these, the Jörkul Peaks, to the north, showed the gently rounded ice caps.”[6] Shimshal Lake is decribed as “a great blue lake, a square mile or more in area.”[7]

While raiders from Hunza and Shimshal used the pass as a starting point for their attacks, as Younghusband reports of a case in autumn 1888, shortly before his arrival: “A party of eighty-seven men of Hunza, armed some with matchlocks, some with swords, and some with picks only, had come from the Shimshal Pass…., attacked a (Kirghiz) caravan and carried off a quantity of goods and captured, to take away as slaves, took with them some 21 Kirghiz men and women.”[8]

Our team proceeds over the pass on our raid for unclimbed secret peaks.....