“Oh! get out! and leave me alone.”
“I send boat for you—ten o’clock to-morrow?”
“No.”
“Twelve o’clock?” &c. &c.
After a short experience of Kashmiri pertinacity and business methods, you cease from politeness and curtly threaten the river.
Certainly the Kashmiri are exceedingly clever and excellent workers in many ways. Their modern embroideries (the old shawl manufacture is totally extinct) are beautiful and artistic. Their wood-carving, almost always executed in rich brown walnut, is excellent; and their old papier-mâché lacquer is very good. The tendency, however, is unfortunately to abandon their own admirable designs, and assimilate or copy Western ideas as conveyed in very doubtful taste by English visitors.
The embroidery has perhaps kept its individuality the best, although the trail of the serpent as revealed in “quaint” Liberty or South Kensington designs is sometimes only too apparent. Certain plants—Lotus, Iris, Chenar leaf, and so-called Dal Lake leaves, as well as various designs taken from the old Kashmir shawls, give scope to the nimble brains and fingers of the embroiderers, who, by-the-bye, are all male.
Their colours, almost invariably obtained from native dyes, are excellent, and they rarely make a mistake in taste.
The coarser work in wool on cushions, curtains, and thick white numdahs is most effective and cheap.
Curiously enough, the best of these numdahs (which make capital rugs or bath blankets) are made in Yarkand; and Stein, in his Sand-Buried Cities of Kotan, found in ancient documents, of the third century or so, “the earliest mention of the felt-rugs or ‘numdahs’ so familiar to Anglo-Indian use, which to this day form a special product of Kotan home industry, and of which large consignments are annually exported to Ladak and Kashmir.”