126 THE HISTORY OF KASHMIR
and unscrupulous intrigue. But he was no more successful, and they continued to preserve a rebellious, independent attitude for centuries later, far into the Mohamedan period,
The accounts of this and the immediately pre- ceding reigns are of particular interest, because Kalhana, the historian to whom the facts are due, lived at this period. We get then a first-hand account of the state of Kashmir eight hundred years ago. It is a petty, melancholy, and sordid history, but it is the record of a contemporary, and T have no hesitation in adopting it as giving a true impression of the state of the country, because | have myself seen a precise counterpart of it in independent states on this very frontier. When I visited Hunza in 1889 the then chief—now in exile —had murdered his father, poisoned his mother, and thrown his two brothers over a precipice. The chief of Chitral, when I was there in 1893, was one of only four survivors of seventeen brothers who were living when their father died, and he himself was subsequently murdered by one of his three surviving brothers—a brother whom he had frequently asked my permission to murder, on the ground that if he did not murder the brother, the
