with forests, in which is to be found almost every kind of deciduous tree.  From time to time we returned for a few days to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, to enjoy the pleasures of more civilized society.  Srinagar is so well known nowadays, and has been so often described in poetry and prose, that it is needless for me to dwell at length upon its delights, which, I am inclined to think, are greater in imagination than in reality.  It has been called the Venice of the East, and in some respects it certainly does remind one of the ‘Bride of the Sea,’ both in its picturesqueness and (when one gets into the small and tortuous canals) its unsavouriness.  Even at the time of which I am writing it was dilapidated, and the houses looked exactly like those made by children out of a pack of cards, which a puff of wind might be expected to destroy.  Of late years the greater part of the city has been injured by earthquakes, and Srinagar looks more than ever like a card city.  The great beauty of the place in those days was the wooden bridges covered with creepers, and gay with booths and shops of all descriptions, which spanned the Jhelum at intervals for the three miles the river runs through the town—­now, alas! for the artistic traveller, no more.  Booths and shops have been swept away, and the creepers have disappeared—­decidedly an advantage from a sanitary point of view, but destructive of the quaint picturesqueness of the town.

The floating gardens are a unique and very pretty characteristic of Srinagar.  The lake is nowhere deeper than ten or twelve feet, and in some places much less.  These gardens are made by driving stakes into the bed of the lake, long enough to project three or four feet above the surface of the water.  These stakes are placed at intervals in an oblong form, and are bound together by reeds and rushes twined in and out and across, until a kind of stationary raft is made, on which earth and turf are piled.  In this soil seeds are sown, and the crops of melons and other fruits raised in these fertile beds are extremely fine and abundant.

The magnificent chunar-trees are another very beautiful feature of the country.  They grow to a great height and girth, and so luxuriant and dense is their foliage that I have sat reading and writing for hours during heavy rain under one of these trees and kept perfectly dry.

The immediate vicinity of Srinagar is very pretty, and the whole valley of Kashmir is lovely beyond description:  surrounded by beautifully-wooded mountains, intersected with streams and lakes, and gay with flowers of every description, for in Kashmir many of the gorgeous eastern plants and the more simple but sweeter ones of England meet on common ground.  To it may appropriately be applied the Persian couplet: 

  ‘Agar fardos baru-i zamin ast, hamin ast, hamin ast’
  (If there be an Elysium on earth, it is this, it is this).

The soil is extremely productive; anything will grow in it.  Put a stick into the ground, and in an extraordinary short space of time it becomes a tree and bears fruit.  What were we about, to sell such a country for three quarters of a million sterling?  It would have made the most perfect sanatorium for our troops, and furnished an admirable field for British enterprise and colonization, its climate being as near perfection as anything can be.