oftness with which age has enriched them. The trees have
been steadily growing under all flags and cults, swelling in pride and
strength as they looked contemptuously and calmly down on the storms of
human passion. They need no repairs, and their style, nobody knows how
much older than Thebes or Dendera, will endure no modification.

The level surface of this alluvion is illustrated by the very slight
descent of the Jhelam. From Ismailabad, near the head of the valley, and
fifty-four hundred feet above the level of the sea, the fall to
Srinagar, thirty miles, is seventy-five feet; and from the capital to
Lake Wular, twenty-four miles below, only fifty-five feet--declivities
in marked contrast with the fall of two thousand eight hundred feet in
eighty miles from the edge of the plateau at Baramula to the plain of
the Panjab. Besides the ancient beaches which indicate the origin of
this upland meadow, there are traceable other and more recent evidences
of a change of level in the waters, pointing to an elevation, as the
former do to subsidence. In the Manas-Bal, the smallest but deepest of
the Kashmirian lakes, submerged ruins, alleged to be those of a temple,
are clearly visible. At another point, fifteen miles below Srinagar,
ruins and fragments of pottery have been exhumed at a great depth. One
of these oscillations appears to be now, or to have been within two
centuries, in progress. Lake Wular has grown shallower, its present
average depth being forty feet.

Man, among these enormous mountains, presents not less notably than
inanimate Nature a singular compound of change and solidity, of the
catastrophic and the secular. The little state of Kashmir, overrun from
time immemorial, in peace or war, by hordes of many races and tongues,
preserves a language and a physiognomy of its own. About forty per cent.
of the words in Kashmiri are Persian, twenty-five Sanscrit, fifteen
Hindusthani, ten Arabic and fifteen Mongol. Its letters resemble those
of the Sanscrit, and are apparently the originals of the Tibetan
characters. They are not much used, the literary capabilities of the
Kashmiris remaining to be developed. Travellers say the men, especially
the upper classes who have maintained the purity of their blood, are the
finest, physically, to be found in the Himaliya. They are stout,
well-built, and pleasing in countenance, resembling Europeans, except in
having a darker complexion. They are more acute and intelligent than