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.
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