My father died in January 1895, and this event entailed the breaking up of our home at Holton Park (an estate in Oxfordshire - the house is now a girl's school - ST-B). My sister Fanny decided to go out to India, on a visit to my brother Cecil in Kashmir. He had been working in the CMS (Church Missionary Society) Missions schools there since the end of 1890. I agreed to go with her, and beside the purpose of bearing her company, I hoped perhaps to find some job in the engineering line. We left London on the P&O liner SS Peninsular on Fri. 8th March, and arrived at Karachi having change to the B.I. boat S.S.Dwarka at Bombay. We proceeded to Lahore, then a journey of 36 hours, and after a day or two to Murree, the hill station 30 miles north of Rawal Pindi. Here we were joined by my brother Albert, then quartered at Mian Mir, and continued our journey (6 days by road and two by river) to Srinegar, Kashmir. We stayed at Holton Cottage with my brother Cecil and family,
and later on, with them at their summer holiday resort at Nil Nág. Otherwise during the next 6 months or so we occupied our time travelling about the Vale of Kashmir and its adjoining valleys, with Albert and on one trip, also with Julian (anothe of the brothers - ST-B), who had come up on leave from Sial Kat.
In August Dr Arthur Neve of the C.M.S. medical mission was intending to start on a journey to Hunza Narga, in the far north of Kashmir, and he asked me to accompany him.
Hunza and Nagar are two small states, the latter very small, consisting only of a few villages, situated in valleys on the South side of the Karakoram Mountains. There were nominally under the suzerainty of the Maharajah of Kashmir. They (Hunza in particular) had been behaving in a very lawless and truculent manner, and in 1892 had been brought to order after a short but hard fought campaign.
Dr Arthur Neve’s purpose was to employ a few weeks' holiday in making a visit to Hunza and Nagar to see what possibilities there might be of starting mission work in those parts.
The direct route to Hunza Nagar was by the lately made military road to the frontier station at Gilghit (220 miles) and then on (60 miles) to Hunza. Owing, however, to the difficulty of supplies and transport on the road, it was closed to ordinary travellers. Dr Never therefore planned to get there by another - rather round about route, that is five marches up the Gilghit road, three over the Deosan Plains to Scardu (more commonly Skardu) in Baltistan. Then north through Shigar (on the Bhigur, a tributary of the Indus) 7 or 8 marches to the Nushik La (pass) 1700 ft. (In his book Thirty Years in Kashmir, Arthur Neve FRCSE, refers to it as the Nushik Pass). The descent from the pass would bring us out onto the Great Hispar Glacier. Several marches down the glacier, and the valley beyond would bring us to Hunza. This pass had long been disused, though it had been crossed a few years before, by Sir Martin Conway’s Exploring Expedition. Owing, however, to its conditions, as my letters relate, we failed to get beyond the pass, and returned to Srinegar by a roundabout route of 26 marches.
