Among the Tibetans | Page 5

addition, I had as escort an Afghan or Pathan, a soldier of the
Maharajah's irregular force of foreign mercenaries, who had been sent
to meet me when I entered Kashmir. This man, Usman Shah, was a
stage ruffian in appearance. He wore a turban of prodigious height
ornamented with poppies or birds' feathers, loved fantastic colours and
ceaseless change of raiment, walked in front of me carrying a big sword
over his shoulder, plundered and beat the people, terrified the women,
and was eventually recognised at Leh as a murderer, and as great a
ruffian in reality as he was in appearance. An attendant of this kind is a
mistake. The brutality and rapacity he exercises naturally make the
people cowardly or surly, and disinclined to trust a traveller so
accompanied.
Finally, I had a Cabul tent, 7 ft. 6 in. by 8 ft. 6 in., weighing, with poles

and iron pins, 75 lbs., a trestle bed and cork mattress, a folding table
and chair, and an Indian dhurrie as a carpet.
My servants had a tent 5 ft. 6 in. square, weighing only 10 lbs., which
served as a shelter tent for me during the noonday halt. A kettle, copper
pot, and frying pan, a few enamelled iron table equipments, bedding,
clothing, working and sketching materials, completed my outfit. The
servants carried wadded quilts for beds and bedding, and their own
cooking utensils, unwillingness to use those belonging to a Christian
being nearly the last rag of religion which they retained. The only
stores I carried were tea, a quantity of Edwards' desiccated soup, and a
little saccharin. The 'house,' furniture, clothing, &c., were a light load
for three mules, engaged at a shilling a day each, including the muleteer.
Sheep, coarse flour, milk, and barley were procurable at very moderate
prices on the road.
Leh, the capital of Ladakh or Lesser Tibet, is nineteen marches from
Srinagar, but I occupied twenty-six days on the journey, and made the
first 'march' by water, taking my house-boat to Ganderbal, a few hours
from Srinagar, via the Mar Nullah and Anchar Lake. Never had this
Venice of the Himalayas, with a broad rushing river for its high street
and winding canals for its back streets, looked so entrancingly beautiful
as in the slant sunshine of the late June afternoon. The light fell brightly
on the river at the Residency stairs where I embarked, on perindas and
state barges, with their painted arabesques, gay canopies, and 'banks' of
thirty and forty crimson-clad, blue-turbaned, paddling men; on the gay
facade and gold-domed temple of the Maharajah's Palace, on the
massive deodar bridges which for centuries have defied decay and the
fierce flood of the Jhelum, and on the quaintly picturesque wooden
architecture and carved brown lattice fronts of the houses along the
swirling waterway, and glanced mirthfully through the dense leafage of
the superb planes which overhang the dark-green water. But the
mercury was 92 degrees in the shade and the sun-blaze terrific, and it
was a relief when the boat swung round a corner, and left the stir of the
broad, rapid Jhelum for a still, narrow, and sharply winding canal,
which intersects a part of Srinagar lying between the Jhelum and the
hill-crowning fort of Hari Parbat. There the shadows were deep, and

chance lights alone fell on the red dresses of the women at the ghats,
and on the shaven, shiny heads of hundreds of amphibious boys who
were swimming and aquatically romping in the canal, which is at once
the sewer and the water supply of the district.
Several hours were spent in a slow and tortuous progress through
scenes of indescribable picturesqueness--a narrow waterway spanned
by sharp-angled stone bridges, some of them with houses on the top, or
by old brown wooden bridges festooned with vines, hemmed in by
lofty stone embankments into which sculptured stones from ancient
temples are wrought, on the top of which are houses of rich men,
fancifully built, with windows of fretwork of wood, or gardens with
kiosks, and lower embankments sustaining many-balconied dwellings,
rich in colour and fantastic in design, their upper fronts projecting over
the water and supported on piles. There were gigantic poplars wreathed
with vines, great mulberry trees hanging their tempting fruit just out of
reach, huge planes overarching the water, their dense leafage scraping
the mat roof of the boat; filthy ghats thronged with white- robed
Moslems performing their scanty religious ablutions; great grain boats
heavily thatched, containing not only families, but their sheep and
poultry; and all the other sights of a crowded Srinagar waterway, the
houses being characteristically distorted and out of repair. This canal
gradually widens into the Anchar Lake, a reedy mere of indefinite
boundaries, the breeding-ground of legions of mosquitos; and after the
tawny twilight