The topographically inclined among biblical commentators might select a great many more unlikely spots for the Garden of Eden than Kashmir. The four rivers are there—the Indus, the Jhelam, the Chenab and the Ravi. Their banks present the widest possible variety of rock, soil, vegetation and animal life. The palm and pomegranate are at home in the valleys, and the dwarf willow and birch are frozen out a long way below the summits of the mountains. The tiger and the ptarmigan are, measured vertically, close neighbors, a mile or two apart, within easy calling distance. Man is equally multiform. All his races are assembled save the African. His extremes in physiognomy, dress, government and religion are brought into close communion. Character, in this cosmopolitan district, gives place to eclecticism. Its features and its occupants represent the whole world, and might readily refurnish it were all the rest of its surface laid desolate.
SUBURB OF SRINAGAR.
Curiously enough, the idea of a garden has always associated itself with Kashmir. Eastern poets and historians speak of it as a garden collectively, and lavish their most brilliant powers of description on the gardens which make it up in detail—the gardens of the terraced hills, the gardens of the broad alluvial plain, and the floating gardens of the lakes Wúlar and Dal. These last, more fortunate than those of Babylon and Nineveh, have maintained their existence to our day, the aquatic cultivator rowing among his parterres and gathering his melons over the gunwale. Fertility has never failed. The permanence in beauty and productiveness designed for Eden has here been sustained by the harmoniously-acting forces of Nature, and Adam might, for all that the explorers tell us to the contrary, have lived in Kashmir after his primitive fashion till now. He would, however, have been compelled in some degree to modify his taste in regard to clothing, unless he confined himself the year through to the valley, ninety miles by twenty, which strictly bears the name. A winter suit would have been indispensable to his excursions among the bordering mountains, which swell from an elevation of ten thousand feet above tide to twenty-two, and even, on the extreme limits of the region now officially named Kashmir, to twenty-eight thousand. As to antiquity, time is, like everything else, on a grand scale in Kashmir. Her earliest dynasty, the Pandu, runs far into the life of the first father, having come to an end twenty-five hundred years before Christ, after a duration of thirteen hundred years, if we are to believe Baron Hügel, an archæologist of the good old German type, who is daunted by no figures, and who simply "reminds the reader," as he would of what he had for dinner yesterday, of the stunning chronology here cited. To the epoch of that primeval dynasty the baron assigns the building of the great temple of Mártand, the ruins of which delight all travellers and excite to the use of such epithets as "wonderful" and "glorious" the impassive Wilson. He declares that they are quite superior to anything architectural around them, and "might yet vie with the finest remains of Greek and Roman architecture." The temple stands solitary on a stretch of table-land four hundred feet above the valley and ten leagues east of the capital. Tradition avers, partly on the strength of several ancient beaches still distinctly marked, that the whole valley was under water when the temple was built, and that it originally stood upon the immediate shore. This generally unreliable guide even goes into details and grows statistical, mentioning the year 266 b.c. as the epoch of the sudden shrinking of the waters to what—or nearly what, for desiccation is said to be still going on—is seen of them now. This becomes less incredible in the light of the extraordinary oscillations of level in the streams and lakes with which the present inhabitants are familiar. In 1858 the Indus rose, at a point below its exit from the mountains, one hundred and sixty feet in twenty-four hours, its rise in the narrow defiles above having been of course greater. A single pool, temporarily formed on the slopes of the mighty Nanga Parbat by the melting of the snow in 1850, was a mile and a half long by half a mile wide and three hundred feet deep—just so much devastation "cocked and primed."
HARI PARBAT, CITADEL OF SRINAGAR.
The modern state of Kashmir dates from 1846, when the Sikh empire, of which it was a part, was overthrown by the British. Golab Singh, who had made himself useful to the Indian government, was placed over it as maharajah, with a show of independence, but real subordination. He fixed his capital at Jummoo, in the extreme south of his dominions and within easy reach of Lahore. The name Jummoo is given by the natives to his whole territory, although the province of that name is, so far as geographical extent goes, a mere fragment of it. The provinces of Jummoo and Kashmir, immediately north of it, comprise together about a third of the aggregate of sixty-eight thousand square miles. Their share of the population is infinitely greater in proportion. Out of a total, in 1873, of 1,534,972 souls, the province of Jummoo contained 861,075—44,000 of them in the city of that name, the political metropolis. The government of Kashmir had 491,846, including 136,000 in the city of Srinagar. The district of Punch, which boasts a rajah of its own, tributary to the maharajah, had 77,566, and the outlying governments, as they are termed, of Gilgit in the extreme north-east, Baltistán in the north, and Ladákh, or Little Tibet, in the east, 104,485 together. In the province of Kashmir the Mohammedans are in the large majority of six to one. In that of Jummoo, on the contrary, the excess is slightly in favor of the Hindús—a circumstance which accounts for the sovereign's choice of a capital, he being a Hindú and showing in his political acts a preference for his co-religionists and a corresponding distrust of his Moslem subjects. In Ladákh, Búdha is supreme, his worshippers numbering 20,254 to 260 followers of Islam and 107 adherents of the Vedas—hardly one to the square mile of all religions.
KASHMIRI BOATMEN.
The different creeds get on very comfortably side by side, the mosque and the idol temple decorating the same street, and the praying-machines of the Lámas grinding out perpetual bliss without let or hinderance from those who believe in another way of reaching the ear of the Unknowable. This Utopian scene of universal toleration has not failed to attract the representatives of our own faith. The Moravians have long had an establishment on the south-eastern mountains, and we read of the conversion of the descendants of the last rajah of Kishtwár by an American missionary—of what sect is not stated.