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