As it was impossible to carry away all the grain we had found, I got permission to issue a ration to all the coolies, who had most of them no supplies of any description, and, telling the guard who had replaced Gammer Sing to let the coolies in in single file, I then sent some Levies to drive them up like sheep.  The news soon spread that food was going cheap, and they didn’t require much driving.  The flour was in a bin about six feet square, by four feet high, and only a small round hole at the top.  We soon enlarged that so that a man could get in.  I furnished him with a wooden shovel evidently meant for the job, and gave the order for the men to file in.  As each man came in he received a shovelful, into his skirt tail, and then had to march round a box and out of the door.  It took some two hours to finish the job, and even then the flour was not expended, while the grain, of which there was some in more bins, had not been touched.  I left the guard over the door, and got back in time to get orders out for the next day’s march, by which time Cobbe and the rearguard had come in, dinner was ready, and it had begun to rain.

We were camped in front of the fort, the men in a field, ourselves alongside on a praying place overlooking the river.  The Levies were on the right, the ammunition and stores piled by the quarter-guard, the coolies locked up in the fort, and the pickets all right, so we turned in.  Towards morning the rain began to fall heavily, so I pulled my bedding under the fort gateway, where I found Stewart and Oldham had already got the best places; however, I found a spot between two levies, and finished the night comfortably enough.  We had not done a bad day’s work on the whole.  Marched from seven in the morning till six at night, covering some twenty miles of hilly country, made a bridge, and occupied one of the chief forts of the country.  Cobbe, with the rearguard, had had the poorest time, but he had had the satisfaction of raiding into Buni.

We woke up next morning to find a dull grey sky and the rain pouring down, everything damp and miserable, and the cook having a fight with the wood to make it burn.  Our proposed march for the day being only a short one, we did not start till eight A.M.  As we were moving off, a Kashmir sepoy turned up who had been one of Edwardes’ party, and whose life had been saved by a friendly villager who gave him some Chitrali clothes.  I told him to fall in with the company, and he came down with us to Chitral.  The remainder of the flour was distributed among the sepoys, and we took as much grain as we could find carriage for, but it was very little.

A small convoy of Punyal Levies joined us that day; they had been foraging up the Yarkhun valley, and had been sent after us by Moberly.  Our road led along the valley through cornfields and orchards, which, in spite of the rain, looked very pretty and green.  The trees were just in their first foliage and the corn about a foot high, while all the peach and apricot trees were covered with bloom.  We did not see a soul on our march, but the officer in charge of the rear-guard reported that as soon as we left Killa Drasan, the villagers came hurrying down the hill in crowds.