e than this--our last on the Wular Lake.

The active figures of the propellent Mangis, and the quiet ones of their
ladies at the helm, completed a picture to be recalled with a sigh when we
are parted by thousands of miles from this entrancing valley.

Sopor we had understood to be but an uninteresting place, but we were,
perhaps, inclined to regard things Kashmirian through somewhat rosy
spectacles. Anyhow, we rather liked Sopor. Mooring close alongside a
remarkably picturesque building standing in the midst of a smooth green
lawn, which was once, I believe, a dak bungalow, we halted to make
arrangements for the hire of coolies and ponies to take us inland, and I
went off to the post-office for letters and to make inquiries as to the
probable depth of water in the river Pohru.

Our skipper, Juma, affirmed that there was no water to speak of; but Juma
probably--nay, certainly--prefers the _otium_ of a sojourn at Sopor to the
toil of punting up the Pohru.

The postmaster declared that there was lots of water, but qualified his
optimism by saying that it was falling fast. So we arranged for our land
transport of ponies for ourselves, and a dandy for Hesketh, to meet us one
march up the river at Nopura, while we ourselves set forward in our boats
to Dubgam, three or four miles down the Jhelum, where the Pohru joins it.
At the entrance are large stores of timber, principally deodar, which is
floated down from the Lolab, stored at Dubgam, and sent thence down
country and otherwhere for sale. The great boom across the river to catch
the floating logs had been carried away in the flood, and merely showed a
few melancholy and ineffectual spikes of wood sticking up above the now
calm and sluggish river.

We towed up easily enough, through a quiet and peaceful country, which
only became gorgeous under the alchemy of sunset, reaching Nopura in good
time to tie up before dinner.

_Friday, September 29_.--On Thursday morning we started, as usual, at dawn,
and proceeded to pole and haul our way up the devious channel of the Pohru.
Some four or five miles we accomplished successfully, although there were
ominous signs of a gradual lack of water, until we came upon a hopeless
shallow, where the river, instead of concentrating its energies on one
deep and narrow channel, had run to waste over a wide bed, where the
wrinkling wavelets showed the golden brown of the gravel just below the
surface. Our big dounga stuck hard and fast at