Winter is not a good time for visiting northern India.  The weather is too cold and stormy.  The roads are frequently obstructed by snow, and the hotels are not built to keep people up to American temperature.  We could not go to Cashmere at all, although it is one of the most interesting provinces of the empire, because the roads were blocked and blizzards were lurking about.  There is almost universal misapprehension about the weather in India.  It is certainly a winter country; it is almost impossible for unacclimated people to live in most of the provinces between March and November, and no one can visit some of them without discomfort from the heat at any season of the year.  At the same time Cashmere and the Punjab province are comfortable no later than October and no earlier than May, for, although the sun is bright and warm, the nights are intensely cold, and the extremes are trying to strangers who are not accustomed to them.  You will often hear people who have traveled all over the world say that they never suffered so much from the cold as in India, and it is safe to believe them.  The same degree of cold seems colder there than elsewhere, because the mercury falls so rapidly after the sun goes down.  However, India is so vast, and the climate and the elevations are so varied, that you can spend the entire year there without discomfort if you migrate with the birds and follow the barometer.  There are plenty of places to see and to stay in the summer as well as in the winter.

We arrived in Bombay on the 12th of December, which was at least a month too late.  It would have been better for us to have come the middle of October and gone immediately north into the Punjab province and Cashmere, where we would have been comfortable.  But during the entire winter we were not uncomfortably warm anywhere, and even in Bombay, which is considered one of the hottest places in the world, and during the rainy season is almost intolerable, we slept under blankets every night and carried sun umbrellas in the daytime.  At Jeypore, Agra, Delhi and other places the nights were as cold as they ever are at Washington, double blankets were necessary on our beds, and ordinary overcoats when we went out of doors after dark.  Sometimes it was colder inside the house than outside, and in several of the hotels we had to put on our overcoats and wrap our legs up in steamer rugs to keep from shivering.  At the same time the rays of the sun from 11 to 3 or 4 in the afternoon were intensely hot, and often seriously affect persons not acclimated.  If we ever go to India again we will arrange to arrive in October and do the northern provinces before the cold weather sets in.

It’s a pity we could not go to Cashmere, because everybody told us it is such an interesting place and so different from other parts of India and the rest of the world.  It is a land of romance, poetry and strange pictures.  Lalla Rookh and other fascinating houris, with large brown eyes, pearly teeth, raven tresses and ruby lips, have lived there; it is the home of the Cashmere bouquet, and the Vale of Cashmere is an enchanted land.  Average Americans know mighty little about these strange countries, and it takes time to realize that they actually exist; but we find our fellow citizens everywhere we go.  They outnumber the tourists from all other nations combined.