A visitor familiar with all the scenic features of the happy valley would almost have us believe that artificial decoration has exhausted itself, and that the art now in demand is simply the art of letting Nature and antiquity alone:
"The valley of Kashmir, properly so called, remains, as in the seventeenth century, the largest and the most beautiful bit of landscape-gardening in the world, a park thirty leagues by ten or twelve. Everything in it seems planned with supernatural ingenuity to delight the eye—fields, orchards, dwellings, rivers and lakes sprinkled with green and flowery islets and ploughed by boats of varied form and size navigated by hanjis (boatmen) whose intelligent countenances, sculpturesque figures and graceful costumes harmonize admirably with the enchanting scenery; innumerable brooks and canals curving capriciously among lawns and rice-meadows and glittering in the sun like ribbons shot with silver."
This portrait leaves out the temples and villas, ancient and modern, the terraces and pavilions edged with the lotus and overhung with vines and plane trees, the Shalmiar Bagh, or Garden of Delight, and the Mishat Bagh, or Garden of Pleasure, where wine-loving Jehángír and his beautiful consort Núr Jahán, the Light of the World, luxuriated in the summers of long ago. This potentate declared that he would rather lose all the rest of his vast and affluent empire than Kashmir. It furnished a place of refreshing retreat for his energies and his conscience, the load of the latter being fully up to the average of an Eastern despot's. By these lulling waters and under this embowering verdure he could shut out from the sight and memory such spectacles as that to which he had treated his rebellious son Khosrou—a long row of seven hundred of the latter's accomplices seated in solemn gravity, but not returning his salute as he was led along, for the sufficient if not immediately perceptible reason that they sat upon thorns, each upon one thorn a foot or so long, of iron. We may suppose the father of Frederick the Great to have had in mind this passage of Oriental life when he forced the prince to witness the execution of his young friend Katte.
Wilson's preference is for the Garden of Pleasure, notwithstanding the elegance of that of Delight. It looks out upon Lake Dal, the Golden Island in front:
"Ten terraces, bounded by magnificent trees and with a stream of water falling over them, lead up to the latticed pavilion at the end of this garden. Between the double stories of this pavilion the stream flows through a marble—or at least a limestone—tank, and the structure is shaded by great chunár trees, while through a vista of their splendid foliage we look down the terraces and water-courses upon the lake below."
A fit dreaming-place this for the lotus-eating monarch of a lotus-eating people. The lake is so full of the lotus and other water-lilies that more than sixty thousand tons of the edible nuts are gathered each year and ground into flour, the root besides serving as a popular esculent. What is an object of devotion with the Tibetans of the higher Himáliyas a few days' journey distant, as formerly with the Egyptians, is to the Kashmiris an article of food and trade. They might draw from the waters, which cover a very small part of the fertile valley, fish enough to support, with the nelumbium nuts, nearly the whole of the present population; but then they are lotus-eaters, and as such improvident and indolent by all rules of poetry and legend.
Srinagar has been likened to Venice. Standing a mile higher in the world, water-communication is its dependence for movement of persons and things almost as exclusively as with the Queen of the Adriatic. For once, the lean, dry Oriental has his fill of water. Moisture prevails in excess. The characteristic flat roof of his house gives place to one with slope enough to shed any shower or number of showers; and that soon becomes clad with a spontaneous growth of plants. The surplus rainfall, however, is not so great as it would be were not the stormy south-west monsoons cut off by the mountains. The English, water-dogs by nature, and last from the blazing plains of the Panjab, do not complain of dampness. One of them, indeed, declares that "the air is exceedingly dry, notwithstanding the immense amount of water in the valley and the frequent showers of rain."
Srinagar—as the city known for four centuries as Kashmir was anciently and is again named under Hindú rule—is a little disappointing in the material employed for most of its structures. Stone is not wanting, but the deodar timber is more abundant, being floated down cheaply from the mountains, where it forms immense forests, the carefully preserved hunting-ground of the Mogul emperors. A Frenchman dubs it a city of chalets, and recommends the architects of Paris to seek there the most charming models for kiosks, verandas, turrets, cupolas, etc. The humblest suburban and rural abodes he pronounces full of the picturesque. They appear to be much in the Swiss style, so natural to an alpine region. They, too, are mostly of wood, except on the high slopes, where that material is scarce or wholly absent, and on the frontiers, where each hut is a little rock-fort.
MEN OF DARDISTÁN.