equent one against man. Against the
latter foe they are at present guaranteed by the quiet of English rule,
but the avalanche and the torrent remain unquelled.

[Illustration: DOGRAS AND MUSSULMANS, JUMMOO.]

The famous vale is an emerald with a rough setting--a jewel always much
sought after, and which would have been carried away long ago had it
been portable. But its mightiest and most fortunate possessors were fain
to come to it by a long and painful path over crags and snows, and to
pass away, one after the other, and leave it in undimmed brightness,
clasped tightly as ever in its frame of rocks. At the beginning of the
fourteenth century its ruler was a Hindu rani, who stabbed herself
rather than marry her traitorous and usurping vizier. Then came the
sway of a Moslem dynasty, two of whose members stand out prominently by
reason of opposite traits. One earned the name of the Image-breaker by
his wanton destruction of the ancient architecture and sculpture. The
balance oscillated toward the good when, in the fifteenth century,
Zein-ul-Abdin introduced the Tibetan goat and the weavers of Turkestan,
and originated the manufacture of the famous shawls. In 1588 the country
was surrendered to the emperor Akbar, who, with the most noted of his
descendants, Jehangir, Shah Jehan and Aurengzebe, made it their favorite
summer-retreat and lavished upon it an expenditure the fruits of which
are yet conspicuous. The Afghans, from beyond the north-west mountains,
seized it in 1752, and were dispossessed by Ranjit Singh in 1819, who
thus restored the supremacy of the ancient religion after more than four
centuries of Moslem rule. The repose now enjoyed by it under the almost
entirely unseen but distinctly felt influence of the English promises to
reproduce something like the palmy days of the Moguls in the matter of
improvement and embellishment, with a security to life and property
under fixed and just laws quite unknown in their time.

[Illustration: FORT AT GILGIT.]

A visitor familiar with all the scenic features of the happy valley
would almost have us believe that artificial decoration has exhausted
itself, and that the art now in demand is simply the art of letting
Nature and antiquity alone:

"The valley of Kashmir, properly so called, remains, as in the
seventeenth century, the largest and the most beautiful bit of
landscape-gardening in the world, a park thirty leagues by ten or
twelve. Everything in it seems plann