TOUR IN CASHMERE AND THIBET WITH SIR HENRY LAWRENCE.—PROMOTION AND TRANSFER TO CIS-SUTLEJ PROVINCES.
Camp, en route to Cashmere, June 10th, 1850.
Your letter from Paris reached me just as I was preparing to start from Umritsur to join Sir Henry Lawrence, and accompany him to Cashmere. I fought against the necessity of leave as long as possible, but I was getting worse and worse daily, and so much weakened from the effects of heat and hard work acting on a frame already reduced by sickness, that I was compelled to be off ere worse came. We yesterday arrived at the summit of the first high ridge southward of the snowy range, and have now only some sixty miles to traverse before entering the valley. To me, travelling is life, and in a country where one has no home, no local attractions, and no special sympathies, it is the greatest comfort in the world. I get terribly ennuyé if I am in one place for three months at a time; yet I think I should be just as tame as ever in England, quite domestic again.
Cashmere, July 8th, 1850.
You would enjoy this lovely valley extremely. I did not know it was so beautiful, having only seen it before in its winter dress. Nothing can exceed the luxuriant beauty of the vegetation, the plane-trees and walnuts especially, except the squalor, dirt, and poverty of the wretched Cashmerians. The King is avaricious, and is old. The disease grows on him, and he wont look beyond his money-bags. There is a capitation tax on every individual practising any labor, trade, profession, or employment, collected daily. Fancy the Londoners having to go and pay a fourpenny and a sixpenny bit each, per diem, for the pleasure of living in the town. Then the tax on all shawls, goods, and fabrics, is about seventy-five per cent., including custom duty; and this the one solitary staple of the valley. The chief crops are rice, and of this, what with one half taken at a slap as "revenue," or rent, and sundry other pulls for dues, taxes, and offerings, so little remains to the farmer, that in practice he pays all, or within a few bushels of all, his produce to the King, and secures in return his food, and that not of the best. Thus the farmer class, or "Zemindars," are reduced pretty well to the state of day-laborers; yet the people are all well clothed, and fuel is to be had for the asking. What a garden it might be made. Not an acre to which the finest water might not be conveyed without expense worth naming, and a climate where all produce comes to perfection, from wheat and barley to grapes and silk. We go northwards on the 20th, first to Ladâkh and Thibet, thence to Iskardo, and then across the Indus to Gilghit, a terra incognita to which, I believe, only one European now living has penetrated. Sir Henry Lawrence is not well, and certainly not up to this trip, but he has made up his mind to go. I do not gain strength as fast as I could wish, but I fancy when once thoroughly unstrung, it takes a long time to recover the wonted tone.
We shall have another frontier war in the cold weather evidently, and I fancy a more prolonged and complete affair than the last. The cause of the only loss sustained in the last scrimmage was the panic of the Sepoys. They are as children in the hands of these Affghans and hill tribes. Our new Punjaub levies fought "like bricks," but the Hindostanee is not a hardy enough animal, physically or morally, to contend with the sturdier races west of the Sutlej, or the active and fighting "Pathàns." The very name sticks in John Sepoy's throat. I must try and see the next contest, but I do not quite see my way to it at present.
To his Sister.
Camp, near Ladâkh, August 4th, 1850.