el, an archaeologist of the
good old German type, who is daunted by no figures, and who simply
"reminds the reader," as he would of what he had for dinner yesterday,
of the stunning chronology here cited. To the epoch of that primeval
dynasty the baron assigns the building of the great temple of Martand,
the ruins of which delight all travellers and excite to the use of such
epithets as "wonderful" and "glorious" the impassive Wilson. He declares
that they are quite superior to anything architectural around them, and
"might yet vie with the finest remains of Greek and Roman architecture."
The temple stands solitary on a stretch of table-land four hundred feet
above the valley and ten leagues east of the capital. Tradition avers,
partly on the strength of several ancient beaches still distinctly
marked, that the whole valley was under water when the temple was built,
and that it originally stood upon the immediate shore. This generally
unreliable guide even goes into details and grows statistical,
mentioning the year 266 B.C.as the epoch of the sudden shrinking of the
waters to what--or nearly what, for desiccation is said to be still
going on--is seen of them now. This becomes less incredible in the light
of the extraordinary oscillations of level in the streams and lakes with
which the present inhabitants are familiar. In 1858 the Indus rose, at a
point below its exit from the mountains, one hundred and sixty feet in
twenty-four hours, its rise in the narrow defiles above having been of
course greater. A single pool, temporarily formed on the slopes of the
mighty Nanga Parbat by the melting of the snow in 1850, was a mile and a
half long by half a mile wide and three hundred feet deep--just so much
devastation "cocked and primed."

[Illustration: HARI PARBAT, CITADEL OF SRINAGAR.]

The modern state of Kashmir dates from 1846, when the Sikh empire, of
which it was a part, was overthrown by the British. Golab Singh, who had
made himself useful to the Indian government, was placed over it as
maharajah, with a show of independence, but real subordination. He fixed
his capital at Jummoo, in the extreme south of his dominions and within
easy reach of Lahore. The name _Jummoo_ is given by the natives to his
whole territory, although the province of that name is, so far as
geographical extent goes, a mere fragment of it. The provinces of Jummoo
and Kashmir, immediately north of it, comprise together about a third of
the aggre