6 in., weighing,
with poles and iron pins, 75 lbs., a trestle bed and cork mattress, a
folding table and chair, and an Indian dhurrie as a carpet.
My servants had a tent 5 ft. 6 in. square, weighing only 10 lbs.,
which served as a shelter tent for me during the noonday halt. A
kettle, copper pot, and frying pan, a few enamelled iron table
equipments, bedding, clothing, working and sketching materials,
completed my outfit. The servants carried wadded quilts for beds and
bedding, and their own cooking utensils, unwillingness to use those
belonging to a Christian being nearly the last rag of religion which
they retained. The only stores I carried were tea, a quantity of
Edwards' desiccated soup, and a little saccharin. The 'house,'
furniture, clothing, &c., were a light load for three mules, engaged
at a shilling a day each, including the muleteer. Sheep, coarse
flour, milk, and barley were procurable at very moderate prices on
the road.
Leh, the capital of Ladakh or Lesser Tibet, is nineteen marches from
Srinagar, but I occupied twenty-six days on the journey, and made the
first 'march' by water, taking my house-boat to Ganderbal, a few
hours from Srinagar, via the Mar Nullah and Anchar Lake. Never had
this Venice of the Himalayas, with a broad rushing river for its high
street and winding canals for its back streets, looked so
entrancingly beautiful as in the slant sunshine of the late June
afternoon. The light fell brightly on the river at the Residency
stairs where I embarked, on perindas and state barges, with their
painted arabesques, gay canopies, and 'banks' of thirty and forty
crimson-clad, blue-turbaned, paddling men; on the gay facade and
gold-domed temple of the Maharajah's Palace, on the massive deodar
bridges which for centuries have defied decay and the fierce flood of
the Jhelum, and on the quaintly picturesque wooden architecture and
carved brown lattice fronts of the houses along the swirling
waterway, and glanced mirthfully through the dense leafage of the
superb planes which overhang the dark-green water. But the mercury
was 92 degrees in the shade and the sun-blaze terrific, and it was a
relief when the boat swung round a corner, and left the stir of the
broad, rapid Jhelum for a still, narrow, and sharply winding canal,
which intersects a part of Srinagar lying between the Jhelum and the
hill-crowning fort of Hari Parbat. There the shadows were deep, and
chance lights alone fell on the red dresses of the women at the
ghats, and on the shaven, shiny heads of hundreds of amphibious boys
who were swimming and aquatically romping in the canal, which is at
once the sewer and the water supply of the district.
Several hours were spent in a slow and tortuous progress through
scenes of indescribable picturesqueness - a narrow waterway spanned by
sharp-angled stone bridges, some of them with houses on the top, or
by old brown wooden bridges festooned with vines, hemmed in by lofty
stone embankments into which sculptured stones from ancient temples
are wrought, on the top of which are houses of rich men, fancifully
built, with windows of fretwork of wood, or gardens with kiosks, and
lower embankments sustaining many-balconied dwellings, rich in colour
and fantastic in design, their upper fronts projecting over the water
and supported on piles. There were gigantic poplars wreathed with
vines, great mulberry trees hanging their tempting fruit just out of
reach, huge planes overarching the water, their dense leafage
scraping the mat roof of the boat; filthy ghats thronged with white-
robed Moslems performing their scanty religious ablutions; great
grain boats heavily thatched, containing not only families, but their
sheep and poultry; and all the other sights of a crowded Srinagar
waterway, the houses being characteristically distorted and out of
repair. This canal gradually widens into the Anchar Lake, a reedy
mere of indefinite boundaries, the breeding-ground of legions of
mosquitos; and after the tawny twilight darkened into a stifling
night we made fast to a reed bed, not reaching Ganderbal till late
the next morning, where my horse and caravan awaited me under a
splendid plane-tree.
For the next five days we marched up the Sind Valley, one of the most
beautiful in Kashmir from its grandeur and variety. Beginning among
quiet rice-fields and brown agricultural villages at an altitude of
5,000 feet, the track, usually bad and sometimes steep and perilous,
passes through flower-gemmed alpine meadows, along dark gorges above
the booming and rushing Sind, through woods matted with the sweet
white jasmine, the lower hem of the pine and deodar forests which
ascend the mountains to a considerable altitude, past rifts giving
glimpses of dazzling snow-peaks, over grassy slopes dotted with
villages, houses, and shrines embosomed in walnut groves, in sight of
the frowning crags of Haramuk, through wooded lanes and park-like
country over which farms are thinly scattered, over unrailed and
shaky bridges, and across avalanche slopes, till it reaches
Gagangair, a dream of lonely beauty, with a camping-ground of velvety
sward under noble plane-trees. Above this place the valley closes in
between walls of precipices and crags, which rise almost abruptly
from the Sind to heights of 8,000 and 10,000 feet. The road in many
places is only a series of steep and shelving ledges above the raging
river, natural rock smoothed and polished into riskiness by the
passage for centuries of the trade into Central Asia from Western
India, Kashmir, and Afghanistan. Its precariousness for animals was
emphasised to me by five serious accidents which occurred in the week
of my journey, one of them involving the loss of the money, clothing,
and sporting kit of an English officer bound for Ladakh for three
months. Above this tremendous gorge the mountains open out, and
after crossing to the left bank of the Sind a sharp ascent brought me
to the beautiful alpine meadow of Sonamarg, bright with spring
flowers, gleaming with crystal streams, and fringed on all sides by
deciduous and coniferous trees, above and among which are great
glaciers and the snowy peaks of Tilail.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 2 of 27
Words from 1007 to 2048
of 27584
