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