KASHMIR VALLEYS 11 



and tumbled down the mountain sides, threatening 

 destruction to all obstacles, and vast moraines scarred 

 the hills, then, with abrupt transition, would succeed a 

 grassy slope, starred with the most delicate spring 

 flowers, shaded by fruit trees just bursting into bloom, 

 or a cluster of wooden huts, the open work of the 

 wooden shutters glass windows are an unknown quan- 

 tity still closed with paper and felt against the rigorous 

 winter cold, and sheltered by spreading walnut or 

 chenaar trees (the oriental plane). The great size of 

 the representatives of our forest trees was very notice- 

 able walnuts, planes, deodars, poplars, are all Goliaths, 

 and dwarf the already tiny proportions of the houses 

 and the " ziarats," wooden Mahomedan shrines, used 

 as mosques. These are pretty little square structures 

 with pyramidal roofs usually smothered with creamy 

 imperial lilies, scarlet tulips, or blue iris. The Kashmiri 

 is such a brawny, muscular person, one wonders how 

 he contrives to live or worship in such wee boxes. 

 Later, I became convinced that, like a squirrel, the 

 householder never uses his dark, warm burrow save 

 to secrete his winter food-stuffs, spending his life in the 

 open, and only curling up round his kangar (charcoal 

 basket) when the weather outside was impossible. 



Hour after hour went by, and on we tore along this 

 one specimen of a road as yet achieved in Kashmir. 

 Always the same features were noticeable, though fresh 

 beauties constantly showed themselves piled-up masses 

 of rock, the outer barricades of the great mountain 

 rampart stretching for two hundred miles between 

 India and the happy valley, an angry rushing river, 

 bearing with giddy speed great rafts of timber and 

 mammoth trunks that constantly blocked, and were 



