The codex, the use of which had been obtained with so much trouble was nearly lost on Stein’s voyage to England in 1890. "The box which contained was dropped over board in the Ostende harbour through the carelessness of a Flemish porter and recovered with difficulty." However, fortunately, Stein had his collation of the complete text safely packed elsewhere also. "Happily too the soaking with sea-water left no perceptible trace in the codex. Kashmir paper of the old make on which the codex was written stood immersion remarkably well and the ink used in the manuscript was in no way effected by water. The owner when they received back in 1892 their respective parts had no inkling of the lustration the codex had undergone." The Codex Archetypus contained all eight cantos of Kalhana’s poem. It consisted of 328 folios of age worn country-paper. One leaf in the middle (folio167) and also the leaf at the end (folio328) had also been lost, probably when the partition of it was made between Pandit Keshav Ram’s sons.

The other manuscript copied from the archetypus and which was in possession of Pandit Govind Kaul resembled in its appearance to Balbhadra Pandit’s manuscript . In April 1895, Stein also obtained a copy of the Codex from the collection of Sanskrit manuscripts belonging to Pandit Jagmohan Lal Hund, a Purohit of Kashmiri descent temporarily resident in Lahore. "Among the contents of miscellaneous bundle of manuscripts a few loose leaves of some Devanagari copy of Rajatarangini attracted his attention." He "made a careful search in the confused rubbish representing the remainder of Jagmohan Lal Hund’s library. The result was that greatest portion of the manuscript was recovered. At first it seemed to promise but little." "A close examination of some detached leaves, to Stein’s surprise, revealed amidst many blunders and corruption that there were also some readings manifestly superior to the original manuscript" of Pandit Keshav Ram. Stein accordingly prepared with the help of Pandit Govind Kaul a careful collation of the whole manuscript.

Folio of Rajatarangni manuscript (Sharada Script) (From Bodleian Library Collection, Oxford)