But the Dansar plain, where the old people used to get the gold dust, the locals said, was five miles away on the other side of the Indus, now the Pakistani side. It took 14 years for Mr. Peissel and a British photographer, Sebastian Guinness, to get permits to visit the Minaro on the Pakistani side, also a strategic zone.

In Pakistan, he said, the Minaro villagers told the same stories. ''We went out to the Dansar plain, overlooking the Indus, at an altitude of some 10,000 feet,'' he said. ''It was astonishing. There were the marmots and the burrows and the piles of sand they threw up.'' Moreover, he said, a landslide had exposed the darker, gold-bearing soil that was three feet below the surface. That was the same soil the marmots brought up from under the sand.

Specialists have long argued about why Herodotus and other ancient writers described the furry gold-digging creatures as ants. Herodotus wrote in his ''Histories'' that some were even kept at the palace of the Persian king, who ruled the region at the time.

Mr. Peissel, author of a book called ''The Ants' Gold,'' says his favored explanation is that confusion set in because in Persian the word for marmot is equivalent to ''mountain ant.''

Marmots, a type of rodent, are unusually large in the Himalayas, wth bushy fur and a large fox-like tail, he said. They have razor-sharp teeth and claws. ''They can be ferocious if one tampers with their burrows, which is just what the gold-seekers did,'' he said.

Stephanie West, a Herodotus scholar at Oxford University in Britain, said that Herodotus was not known to speak Persian, although the Persians invaded Halicarnassus, the Greek city where he lived from around 480 B.C.

''He traveled to Egypt but not to India,'' Ms. West said. ''He could have got it wrong. His information came from talking to travelers and reading what there was to be read.''