KASHMIR. 
31 
had acquired great respect from all good Mahomedans. 
1 found him at Srmagar, the guest of the Mahara- 
jah, as he had been a guest of the British Grovernment, 
and lodged in the house of one Khwaja Gafur Shah 
Naksh-bandi, a person of note in Kashmir. Maho- 
med Yakub, besides considering himself a very holy 
man, prided himself on being an accomplished 
author; and as we sat down together on a carpet, 
under some wide-spreading plane-trees, to escape a 
shower of rain, he ordered his servants to produce two 
well-bound and neatly written volumes which he said 
he had composed whilst halting at Srmagar. In 
his train was an Arab priest, who had come from 
Medina on a visit to Yarkand. This man, named 
Kalil, could scarcely speak a word of Persian, and 
knew nothing of any language current in Hindustan, 
yet had made his way by steamer up the Indus, and, 
by way of Lahore, to Srmagar, where he placed him- 
self under the charge of Kazi Mahomed Yakub. 
From his companions I learned that this Arab had 
been attracted to Kashgdr by the fame of the Atalik's 
liberality to all good Mahomedans, that ruler having 
made himself known at Mecca by establishing and 
endowing a caravanserai there. Kalil, in the hope 
of obtaining a good sum of money, and possibly the 
endowment of a school at Medina, had brought some 
wonderful specimens of Arab books, Korans, &c." 
At Ganderbal we encamped under some enormous 
Plane-trees ; the largest of these had a girth of twenty- 
nine feet, at four feet from the ground, and the two next 
largest were each twenty feet in girth. The Platanus 
orientalis is one of the most common and handsome trees 
in Kashmir, but is not indigenous there, for it is said 
