The canal was closely lined with house-boats and their satellite cook-boats, clinging to the poplar-shaded banks. The golf-links lay on our left, and on a low spur to the right stood the hospital, which the energy and philanthropy of the Neves has gained for the remarkably ungrateful Kashmiri. It is told that a man, being exceedingly ill, was cared for and nursed during many weeks in the Mission Hospital, his whole family likewise living on the kindly sahibs. When he was cured and shown the door, he burst into tears because he was not paid wages for all the time he had spent in hospital!
Just before entering the waterway of noble chenars, known as the Chenar Bagh (a camping-ground reserved for bachelors only), we ported our helm (or at least would have done so had there been any rudders in Kashmir), and pushed through the lock-gate, which gives entrance to the Dal Lake, against a brisk current.
This gate, cunningly arranged upon the non-return-valve principle, is normally kept open by the current from the Dal; but if the Jhelum, rising in flood, threatens to pour back into the lake and swamp the low ground and floating gardens, it closes automatically, and so remains sealed until the outward flow regains the mastery.
A sharp bout of paddling, puffing, and splashing shot us into the peaceful waters of the Dal Lake, over which every traveller has gushed and raved. It is difficult, indeed, not to do so, for it is truly a dream of beauty.
A placid sheet of still water, its surface only broken here and there by the silvery trails of rippled wake left by the darting shikaras or slow-moving market boats, lay before us, shining in the crystal-clear atmosphere. On the right rose the Takht, his thousand feet of rocky stature dwarfed into insignificance by holy Mahadeo and his peers, whose shattered peaks ring round the lake to the north, their dark cliffs and shaggy steeps mirrored in its peaceful surface.
On the lower slopes strong patches of yellow mustard and white masses of blossoming pear-trees rose behind the tender green fringe of the young willows.
As we swept on, the lake widened. On the left a network of water lanes threaded the maze of low-growing brushwood and whispering reeds, and round us extended the half-submerged patches of soil which form the celebrated “floating gardens” of the lake. From any point of view except the utilitarian, these gardens are a fraud. A combination of matted and decaying water-plants, mud, and young cabbages kept in place by rows and thickets of willow scrub, is curious, but not lovely; and our eyes turned away to where Hari Parbat raised his crown of crumbling forts above the native city, or to the mysterious ruins of Peri Mahal, clinging like a swallow’s nest to the shelving slopes above Gupkar.
“Still onward; and the clear canal
Is rounded to as clear a lake;”
and we emerged from the willow-fringed water lanes, and saw across the wider shield of glistering water the white cube of the Nishat Bagh Pavilion—the Garden of Joy, made for Jehangir the Mogul—standing by the water’s edge, and at its foot a great throng and clutter of boats, amidst whose snaky prows we pushed our way and landed, something stiff after sitting for two hours in a cramped shikara.
Other guests—some thirty in all—were arriving, either like us by boat, or by carriage viâ Gupkar, and we strolled in groups up the sloping gardens, which still show, in their wild and unrestrained beauty, the loving touch of the long-vanished hand of the Mogul.