Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

North of Jummoo the highest type of road accommodates no longer an elephant, but at most a hill-pony. In the vale of Srinagar the chief thoroughfares are sluggish rivers, lakes and canals, navigated by a remarkably sturdy race of boatmen. The chief line of traffic to that valley, the heart of Kashmir proper, from Jummoo, is hardly practicable for horses. In its length of a hundred and seventy-seven miles it crosses two ridges, each nine thousand feet above the sea, with a hollow between five thousand feet deep. The starting-point, or southern end of the path, is fifteen hundred feet above tide, and the valley of Srinagar from fifty-two hundred to sixty-five hundred. These are all trifling elevations compared to those of the Himaliya on the south-east and the Karakoram chain, to which England has pushed the maharajah's boundary, on the north; but they will do very well for Western tourists to "cut their teeth on," especially as they are interspersed with minor hills of every grade of height and surface. The varied assortment of climates also supports the idea of a general training-ground for travellers. Bernier thought the first summit he crossed, coming from the south, "the dreadful rim of the world," but the descent of it plumped him, "as if by enchantment, into the centre of France." In sheltered places with a southern exposure the tropics reappear, but the vegetation of the foothills and middle mountains is said to be, but for the deodara cedar (_Pinus excelsa_) and a few other trees, European in character. The resemblance of the undergrowth is less marked, and still less that of the inhabitants, the costume of the mountaineers, notably the tribe named Gaddis, reasserting Asia. These Oriental Swiss are as hardy as their Western analogues, thanks to a continual struggle for existence against Nature and a tolerably frequent one against man. Against the latter foe they are at present guaranteed by the quiet of English rule, but the avalanche and the torrent remain unquelled.

The famous vale is an emerald with a rough setting--a jewel always much sought after, and which would have been carried away long ago had it been portable. But its mightiest and most fortunate possessors were fain to come to it by a long and painful path over crags and snows, and to pass away, one after the other, and leave it in undimmed brightness, clasped tightly as ever in its frame of rocks. At the beginning of the fourteenth century its ruler was a Hindu rani, who stabbed herself rather than marry her traitorous and usurping vizier. Then came the sway of a Moslem dynasty, two of whose members stand out prominently by reason of opposite traits. One earned the name of the Image-breaker by his wanton destruction of the ancient architecture and sculpture. The balance oscillated toward the good when, in the fifteenth century, Zein-ul-Abdin introduced the Tibetan goat and the weavers of Turkestan, and originated the manufacture of the famous shawls. In 1588 the country was surrendered to the emperor Akbar, who, with the most noted of his descendants, Jehangir, Shah Jehan and Aurengzebe, made it their favorite summer-retreat and lavished upon it an expenditure the fruits of which are yet conspicuous. The Afghans, from beyond the north-west mountains, seized it in 1752, and were dispossessed by Ranjit Singh in 1819, who thus restored the supremacy of the ancient religion after more than four centuries of Moslem rule. The repose now enjoyed by it under the almost entirely unseen but distinctly felt influence of the English promises to reproduce something like the palmy days of the Moguls in the matter of improvement and embellishment, with a security to life and property under fixed and just laws quite unknown in their time.

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 Jehangir and his beautiful consort Nur Jahan, 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 _chunar_ 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 Himaliyas 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 Hindu 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.

Even the piers of the bridges over the Jhelam are, above the water at least, formed of large logs, which overlap each other and approach with their ends the middle of each span after the semblance of an arch. Parasitic plants, and even considerable trees, take root in their crevices and disguise the structure in an even more bizarre way than the mediaeval buildings did Old London Bridge. There are seven of these bridges within the city, about three hundred feet long, and between them on either hand the houses overhang the water at the expense of all visible shore, sometimes striding out upon stilt-like piles, their multiform gables "fantastically set" with a total disregard of uniformity and extent of facade that would have been the death of Baron Haussmann or the builder of a Philadelphia block. Nevertheless, there is a pervading tone and style which would identify a Kashmiri villa transplanted into Christendom.

Two isolated hills overlooking the city, and visible afar off to the weary wayfarer, are crowned and flanked with fortifications and temples of one or the other religion. The list of the latter edifices included, in Bernier's time, a Hindu pagoda claimed by the inhabitants to have been built by Solomon, but it has now disappeared as completely as his better-authenticated effort at Jerusalem. In return, as compensation, a Mohammedan mosque has given place to a modern fort. The march of improvement or of change shows itself in a yet more modern array of cottages erected for the accommodation of English visitors. Here these gentry hide themselves in an absolute forest of fruit trees of the kinds familiar at home--apple, apricot, cherry, etc. The lovers of the apricot may be interested to learn that it is _par excellence_ the fruit of this soi-disant Eden, this glittering attic-window upon the Roof of the World, and of all the slopes thereof up to the white-tiled roof-tree. It flourishes up to ten thousand feet, only the stone-pine, of all edibles, going higher; and dried apricots are a leading staple among the hillmen, as dates are with the Arabs.

Upon the bazaars the English architect has laid his heavy hand, and villas and shops like those of the Thames promise to mark the artistic renaissance of Kashmir. The pleasure-houses of the emperors before mentioned have so far escaped him, although it is to be feared he will soon have the repairing of them. Their principal charms, the turf, the great trees and the cascades, were never more beautiful, and have rather gained by the softness with which age has enriched them. The trees have been steadily growing under all flags and cults, swelling in pride and strength as they looked contemptuously and calmly down on the storms of human passion. They need no repairs, and their style, nobody knows how much older than Thebes or Dendera, will endure no modification.

The level surface of this alluvion is illustrated by the very slight descent of the Jhelam. From Ismailabad, near the head of the valley, and fifty-four hundred feet above the level of the sea, the fall to Srinagar, thirty miles, is seventy-five feet; and from the capital to Lake Wular, twenty-four miles below, only fifty-five feet--declivities in marked contrast with the fall of two thousand eight hundred feet in eighty miles from the edge of the plateau at Baramula to the plain of the Panjab. Besides the ancient beaches which indicate the origin of this upland meadow, there are traceable other and more recent evidences of a change of level in the waters, pointing to an elevation, as the former do to subsidence. In the Manas-Bal, the smallest but deepest of the Kashmirian lakes, submerged ruins, alleged to be those of a temple, are clearly visible. At another point, fifteen miles below Srinagar, ruins and fragments of pottery have been exhumed at a great depth. One of these oscillations appears to be now, or to have been within two centuries, in progress. Lake Wular has grown shallower, its present average depth being forty feet.

Man, among these enormous mountains, presents not less notably than inanimate Nature a singular compound of change and solidity, of the catastrophic and the secular. The little state of Kashmir, overrun from time immemorial, in peace or war, by hordes of many races and tongues, preserves a language and a physiognomy of its own. About forty per cent. of the words in Kashmiri are Persian, twenty-five Sanscrit, fifteen Hindusthani, ten Arabic and fifteen Mongol. Its letters resemble those of the Sanscrit, and are apparently the originals of the Tibetan characters. They are not much used, the literary capabilities of the Kashmiris remaining to be developed. Travellers say the men, especially the upper classes who have maintained the purity of their blood, are the finest, physically, to be found in the Himaliya. They are stout, well-built, and pleasing in countenance, resembling Europeans, except in having a darker complexion. They are more acute and intelligent than the Sikhs and than the Dogras or Hindus of Jummoo, their present superiors politically. They are industrious, manufacturing besides shawls other stuffs and much fancy-work in wood. The beauty of the women is as much remarked upon now as in the old days, and the late Mr. Moore cannot be accused of overstepping poetic license on that point.

The higher classes of the Kashmiris having held more firmly to their religion during Mohammedan sway, most of the non-Moslem inhabitants are Brahmans, and they live chiefly in the city. Unlike their co-religionists of the province of Jummoo, many of whose high-caste men cultivate the soil, the Kashmiri Brahmans contemn manual occupations. They are largely employed in the offices of the state. The lowest occupations are left to a class of pariahs called Batals, who are considered by some to represent a wholly distinct race, a remnant of the aborigines who were dispossessed by the first Aryan settlers. As it is easier to procure photographs of individuals belonging to this degraded class than of those above them, an unjust impression of the physical traits of the Kashmiris is apt to reach the Western World. The dancing-girls are Batals, and are pronounced by those who know very unfavorable specimens of the Kashmiri fair. The Mohammedan women are always veiled.

But ethnic science, whether based on linguistic, physical, social or religious distinctions, is in a very unsatisfactory condition. Surprising yet illusory resemblances are constantly cropping up in the most unexpected ways and places. Wilson was struck with the Gaelic traits of the Mongolian Budhists who inhabit the mountains of Zanskar, south-east of the valley. "The sound of their language, the brooches which fasten their plaids, the varieties of tartan which their woollen clothes present, and even the features of the people (which are of an Aryan rather than a Tartar type), strongly reminded me of the Scotch Highlanders." He had the support, too, of one of those imaginative savants who delight in Welsh, Erse and Gaelic philology, who insisted "that the names of innumerable places in Tibet and Tartary are identical with the local names of the Gaelic language." Add to this the fact that a corps of the maharajah's army is uniformed in an almost critically exact reproduction of "the garb of old Gaul," and the argument is a good deal more complete than many on more practically momentous points which have done service for centuries and are still accepted. We have the Gauls of Galatia, Galatz, Galicia, Gallia proper and Gaeldoch (or Caledonia), forming a continuous chain of Gallic settlements from the Himaliya to the Ultima Thule. And now the circuit is complete. The current sets back from the West. The slogan, heard so tellingly at Lucknow, is swelling up the glaciers of the Asiatic fatherland to save it from the Scythians! Monkbarns lived too soon.

The Mohammedans of Baltistan, on the opposite (or northern) side of Kashmir, again surprise us by speaking a Tartar tongue. We are not told that they are Scotch, endowed though they undoubtedly are with some of the canny and thrifty characteristics of the dwellers ayont the Tweed. They are inveterate tradesmen, and carry their small wares, including hill-ponies, all through the mountains. Let us drop in upon them, if such an expression be applicable to a climb of the most tremendous description. It takes us up the steps of the steepest and loftiest slope of the amphitheatre which forms the maharajah's dominions. First, however, we begin by a gentle and pleasant descent down the Jhelam to Lake Wular. Then begins the trouble. We turn northward, and find ourselves at the end of the first stage four thousand feet above the valley, on the brink of an artificial sheet of water surrounded by dense evergreen woods. Next day we rise 2000 feet higher, and redescend 6500 feet to the banks of the Kischanganga, the chief affluent of the Jhelam, running mostly parallel to the course of the latter stream. Then we undulate--if so soft a term be applicable to a route so sharply, abruptly and irregularly serrate--along the spurs which border the river, now in the forest and now on a bleak plateau where careful irrigation avails to grow nothing less hardy than millet, peas and buckwheat. In crossing to the valley, or rather trench, of the upper Indus, we have the choice of two passes, one 13,060 and the other 13,500 feet above tide. Having selected the least of these two evils, we swoop nearly six thousand feet down upon the village of Astor and a new language, the Dard. The temptation to stop and study either is small. If we are insatiate of climbing or find the heat at Astor--only 7853 feet above the sea--oppressive, we have the ice-cone of Nanga Parbat, 26,629 feet high, within ten miles to the west. We are within unpleasantly easy reach of the western and north-western frontier now; for the opposite slope of Nanga Parbat and the ridge to which it belongs is held by the independent Mohammedan tribes of Yaghistan, born marauders since the beginning of tradition. They have a republican form of government, one of the fierce democracies numbering only seven houses. Life, liberty and the pursuit of other people's property is a motto they act up to with a persistency and consistency highly disagreeable to their neighbors over the hill. The latter have, in self-defence, evinced a tendency to adopt the same rule of action, and to steal from their friends by way of reimbursement for what is stolen by their enemies--a disposition which is discouraged by the maintenance of a considerable garrison at Astor.

The valley of Gilgit, continuous with that of Astor, inasmuch as the two abut upon the Indus at nearly the same point, one falling and the other rising, is the core of a tongue of territory projecting north-west into the heart of Yaghistan, and nearly dividing that turbulent region into two parts. The British in attaching this corner to Kashmir rather strained established boundaries in their own favor, and will doubtless continue the process till all Yaghistan is absorbed and the great Karakoram range becomes the frontier from the Afghan territory to that of Chinese Tibet.

At the town of Gilgit we have a reproduction in little of the valley of Srinagar. Its level is somewhat lower, and, though farther north by two degrees, it ripens such southern fruits as the pomegranate, etc. Its attractions will not, however, have full sway so long as the peace of the region remains precarious. The last attack from Yaghistan was signally repulsed in 1866. The practice of going armed is still general, and travellers need an escort. Some of the villages resemble the casemates, mines and covered-ways of a fortress. The people are of the same family and religion with those over the border, their foes, although perhaps less hated by them than their nominal compatriots the Kashmiris and Dogras. The Dards are an active and proud people, fond of independence, with features distinctly Caucasian.

Continuing our exploration of the upper benches of the amphitheatre, we turn to the right and skirt the upper Indus, which runs for several hundred miles from south-east to north-west close along the southern foot of the Karakoram, or rather upon a "hip" of the Roof of the World. Skardu, on the left bank, was an independent capital down to 1840, and its aspect is still stormy in a political as in a climatic sense. The land looks like a petrified storm, the waves of granite and slate dotted sporadically with huts and microscopic bits of culture. Only in a few of the deep valleys is Nature less inhospitable. The glaciers descend to an altitude of 13,500 feet, with an upward extent of twenty-five miles or more; cultivation, after a fashion, existing at their lower edge, and grass growing for a season of six or eight weeks much farther up. The Baltoro glacier leads up to a stupendous peak, the second in height of all known elevations, but not yet dignified with a name, being only labelled in the Indian Survey "K. 2." Its height is 28,265 feet, or 687 less than Gaurisankar, the giant of mountains, a peak in the Eastern Himaliya. The summits next to K.2 are from 25,000 to 27,000 feet. Among them lies the pass of Mustagh, 18,300 feet above tide, up to 1863 a high-road between India and Yarkand, practicable for but a few weeks of summer. The brief interval left by the snow the brigands have extinguished.

After the abandonment of this pass, that of Karakoram, forty leagues east of it, became the principal route to Central Asia. The elevation is exactly the same. Of the five hundred and fifteen miles, divided into thirty-five marches, between Leh and Yarkand, a hundred and fifty traverse ice, naked rocks and precipices, wholly devoid of grass or fuel. Still farther east, in the extreme north-eastern angle of Ladakh and the Kashmiri states, a third route to Turkestan has been opened. It is longer than the others, but is practicable for near half the year, and can be traversed by horses and two-humped camels instead of yaks and ponies, as at the western crossings. On three stages only are wood and grass absent. It ascends from the south over a plateau marked by salt or brackish lakes. It is difficult to say which of the three contestant empires, Russia, China and England, has easiest or least impracticable access to the coveted core of Asia.

If the handful of Little Tibetans occupy the gallery of the Kashmiri theatre, there are wells in it which go down to the level of the dress-circle. These lower levels have traits of culture--trees, grass, whitewashed brick or stone dwellings, and nunneries and religious monuments on the roadside and sometimes arching the road. All, high and low in rank and topography, are deeply pious, and devote the greater part of their waking hours to muttering a supplicatory formula of six syllables, so far translatable by Christians only to the extent of its meaning something about the Deity and the lotus.

The trip from New York to Jummoo is about as long in point of time as to California twenty-five years ago. As many years hence the survivors of us may be getting up Thanksgiving or Christmas reunions at the old homestead of the Aryan family. It will never be a hackneyed spot. It stands too much on end. Steep mountains are never hackneyed: Cook's Personally Conducted will never permeate Kashmir.

EDWARD C. BRUCE.

"FOR PERCIVAL."