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. Fashion has deserted
Sonamarg, rough of access, for Gulmarg, a caprice indicated by the
ruins of several huts and of a church. The pure bracing air,
magnificent views, the proximity and accessibility of glaciers, and
the presence of a kind friend who was 'hutted' there for the summer,
made Sonamarg a very pleasant halt before entering upon the supposed
seventies of the journey to Lesser Tibet.
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