there--the Indus, the Jhelam, the Chenab and the Ravi.
Their banks present the widest possible variety of rock, soil,
vegetation and animal life. The palm and pomegranate are at home in the
valleys, and the dwarf willow and birch are frozen out a long way below
the summits of the mountains. The tiger and the ptarmigan are, measured
vertically, close neighbors, a mile or two apart, within easy calling
distance. Man is equally multiform. All his races are assembled save the
African. His extremes in physiognomy, dress, government and religion are
brought into close communion. Character, in this cosmopolitan district,
gives place to eclecticism. Its features and its occupants represent the
whole world, and might readily refurnish it were all the rest of its
surface laid desolate.

[Illustration: SUBURB OF SRINAGAR.]

Curiously enough, the idea of a garden has always associated itself with
Kashmir. Eastern poets and historians speak of it as a garden
collectively, and lavish their most brilliant powers of description on
the gardens which make it up in detail--the gardens of the terraced
hills, the gardens of the broad alluvial plain, and the floating gardens
of the lakes Wular and Dal. These last, more fortunate than those of
Babylon and Nineveh, have maintained their existence to our day, the
aquatic cultivator rowing among his parterres and gathering his melons
over the gunwale. Fertility has never failed. The permanence in beauty
and productiveness designed for Eden has here been sustained by the
harmoniously-acting forces of Nature, and Adam might, for all that the
explorers tell us to the contrary, have lived in Kashmir after his
primitive fashion till now. He would, however, have been compelled in
some degree to modify his taste in regard to clothing, unless he
confined himself the year through to the valley, ninety miles by twenty,
which strictly bears the name. A winter suit would have been
indispensable to his excursions among the bordering mountains, which
swell from an elevation of ten thousand feet above tide to twenty-two,
and even, on the extreme limits of the region now officially named
Kashmir, to twenty-eight thousand. As to antiquity, time is, like
everything else, on a grand scale in Kashmir. Her earliest dynasty, the
Pandu, runs far into the life of the first father, having come to an end
twenty-five hundred years before Christ, after a duration of thirteen
hundred years, if we are to believe Baron Hueg