er. The Moghul Emperor
Akbar built there a summer palace, and the arches, on which it is
said rested the private apartments of the lovely Nur Jehan, are still
visible.

We wandered over the beautiful and fertile Lolab valley, and pitched
our little camp in the midst of groves of chunar, walnut, apple,
cherry, and peach trees; and we marched up the Sind valley, and
crossed the Zojji La Pass leading into Thibet. The scenery all along
this route is extremely grand. On either side are lofty mountains,
their peaks wrapped in snow, their sides clothed with pine, and their
feet covered 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