up over the main road
to Nedou's Hotel, where boats lay moored outside the dining-room windows,
then across the lagoon, lightly rippled by a tiny breeze, beneath which
lay the polo-ground, to the Residency, where we landed to inspect damages.

The water had been all over the lower storey, but a muddy deposit on the
wooden floor, and a brown slimy high-water mark on the door jambs, alone
remained to show what had happened. The piano had been hoisted upon a
table, carpets and curtains bundled upstairs, and everything, apparently,
saved. The poor garden, with its slime-daubed shrubs, broken palings and
torn creepers, trailing wisps of draggled foliage in the oozy brown pools,
was a sad and pitiful sight, especially when mentally contrasted with the
glowing glory of asters and zinneas which it should have been.

The flood has been nearly as bad as the great one of 1903. Fortunately the
Spill Canal, cut above Srinagar to carry off the flood water, took off
some of the pressure; the bund, also, is three feet higher than it was
then, but it gave way in two places--one somewhere near the top, and the
other just below the Bank, letting in the river to a depth of ten feet
over the low-lying quarter. The stream is now falling fast, and, after
doing a little shopping and visiting the post-office, which is temporarily
established on the bund in the midst of an amazing litter of desks, boxes,
and queer pigeon-holes admirably adapted to lose letters by the score, we
spun swiftly down the rushing stream to tea and our cosy dounga.

_Monday, September_ 18.--It was impossible to get our boats up the river
yesterday, so I spent the day sketching amidst the most picturesque, but
horribly smelly, part of the town; much quinine in the evening seemed
desirable as a counterblast to possible malaria.

The sunsets lately have been really magnificent; the poplars and chenars,
darkly olive, reflected in the flooded fields against a red gold sky, in
the foreground the black silhouettes of the armada.

The days are almost too hot, but the nights are cool and delicious, and
the mosquitoes are only noticeable for a brief period of sinful activity
about sundown, after which the wicked cease from troubling and the weary
are at rest.

At half-past ten this morning we set sail; that is to say, we hired nine
extra coolies and a second shikara to tow, and advanced on Srinagar.
Hesketh's boat, being the lighter, kept well ahead (here let me note that
"b