Slightly larger than cats, the marmots live in holes dug out of the Dansar's sandy soil. In a land once ruled by the Persians, the legend of the golden ants is likely the result of an error in translation. And the mountain ants do indeed dig up gold on occasion. People, for the most part, avoid the Dansar in a way that would have been unnatural for the ancestors of past millennia. But gold is still panned in some of Baltistan's fast-flowing rivers.
Local people use sluicing implements unchanged by the passage of the centuries.
Returns in river beds, however are just as meager as those on the Dansar, but significantly safer to obtain. The spectacular terrain of Baltistan's Dansar plain may have finally revealed the legend of the golden ants, but it seems it was a legend far richer in the telling than in substance.