The four miles an hour dwindled down to a bare half. The darkness deepened, owing to which possibly they lost their way, turning east instead of west. Away from the Hall they wandered, oblivious of a purple-faced gentleman who was awaiting them there, and whose wrath was rapidly rising as he viewed the still mistressless tea-table.
The fair valley of Kashmir lay drowsing in the August sunshine—a strip of green and gold nestling amid a waste of rocky mountains. All around rose the great hills, bare and sun-scorched for the most part towards the west and south—at which point enters the main road from India—but to the east draped with heavy mantles of fir and towering pine; far away, a glittering rampart of eternal snow and ice, the great mass of the Himalayas barred the way to the north, its jagged peaks and saw-like ridges fretting the deep cloudless blue of the sky.
Over the valley itself, now a riotous waste of colour, hung a shimmering vale of heat; through the warm heavy air, drowsy with the perfume of a thousand blossoms, gaudy dragon-flies darted to and fro, or hung poised with tremulous vibration of gauzy wings; while here and there orange and purple butterflies drifted lazily from flower to flower. Tiny rivulets murmured sleepily, as they threaded their way through woods of chestnut, apple and pear, interspersed with patches of golden millet and Indian corn, the sole worldly wealth of some Kashmiri husbandman, the roof of whose hut might be seen peering through the surrounding clump of trees.
Born in the snowy mountains to the north, the river Jhelum winds its way southwards through the centre of the valley, passing through the great lake of Kashmir, a vast sheet of burnished silver, on the still surface of which lie masses of coral-pink lotus. Onward the river crawls, lapping in sleepy caress the wooden piles and temple-steps of Srinagar, the country’s capital, a ramshackle cluster of wooden, chalet-like houses, built on both sides of the river. Still half-asleep, it creeps on for some hundred miles through a land golden with crops and bright with flowers and fruit, on past Baramoula, the terminus of the tonga service from Rawal Pindi, and out by a gorge in the mountains, through which lies the road to India and the south. Then it awakes, and hemmed in by jutting crag and precipice, its course vexed by boulder and quicksand, becomes henceforth a wild torrent, roaring its way onward to Mother Indus and the sea.