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Asiatic peasant and artisan. Srinagar is rich in the grounds for such an induction. Let me say at once that the city, picturesque, and even romantic as in some respect it is, appeared to me, as I saw it more than thirty years ago, to have been altogether extravagantly praised. Being situated on both banks of a river, from which diverge a certain number of canals, it has sometimes been compared to Bangkok, the capital of Siam, while both cities have been compared to Venice. Srinagar was about as much like Bangkok, and both were as much like Venice, as a hansom cab is like a gondola. Srinagar was essentially tumbledown, slatternly, ignoble, unregenerate. It had in it nothing of the grandiose, or even imposing. Its colour was a uniform and dirty drab; its picturesqueness was that of decrepitude; its romance, if any, was that of decay.

Imagine a river from 90 to 150 yards in normal width, with banks from 15 to 30 feet in height, which for over two miles of its serpentine course is fringed on either side by an irregular line of two- or even three-storeyed buildings. Nearly all these buildings are of a crude, dust-coloured brick, held together by layers of mud. Many of them are in a state of extreme dilapidation; though a certain comeliness is lent to the more pretentious by the balconies and lattices of pierced woodwork that overlook the stream. They are precariously saved from the ravages of the floods, either by being elevated upon long wooden piles or upon a crumbling masonry embankment, among whose stones may be seen embedded the capitals and cornices of ancient Hindu

temples a significant testimony to the indifference with which successive dynasties in Kashmir have treated the cult of their predecessors, and which finds an additional illustration in the contrast between the ancient mosques, attesting the religion of the majority of the people, and the Hindu temples with pyramidal cupolas coated over with tin plates (mostly the sides of broken-up oil-cans) that reflect the pagan zeal of the Dogras or ruling race.

In spite of the precautions above alluded to, the Jhelum is apt to rise above the embankment and the piles, and to assail the rickety structures on their summit. In 1893 the flood, which was the biggest known for fifty years, had inundated the European quarter known as the Munshi Bagh, stood several feet deep in the ground-floor of the houses, and swept clean away six of the seven wooden bridges that spanned the stream. They were afterwards restored on the former model, which was said to have an antiquity of 400 years. It is well adapted both to the æsthetic and to the more material aspects of Srinagar. A wooden platform with hand-rail is laid upon three immense stacks or piers in the bed of the stream, which have the appearance of scaffoldings from a distance, but in reality consist of a superstructure of deodar logs laid roughly across each other upon a foundation of piles, and packed with loose stones. In former days there were rows of shops on the top of two at least of the bridges, as upon old London Bridge, and upon the Ponte Vecchio at Florence. But on the newer fabrics these had disappeared. Between the piers the fish leap

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SRINAGAR

from the muddy water, and boatmen are constantly letting down and drawing up immense nets. One of the features of the river is the number of wooden bathing-boxes or platforms that are moored near to the sides for the ablutions either of daily life or of religious observance.

This chapter is not intended to be a guide-book of Srinagar, and therefore I will say nothing about the mosques or public buildings, the palaces or bazaars, of the town. It is better indeed and fairer to Srinagar not to leave its aquatic highway at all, for there is concentrated whatever it possesses of individuality or charm. Out of a total population estimated in 1894 at 132,000, some 10,000 had their habitation on the river. Thereon might be seen the several varieties of Kashmir boat-the bahat, a big grain barge, slowly propelled by poles; the dunga, or ordinary passenger boat, which was used both for residence and for journeys, and which had a sloping roof of mats or reeds; the shikara, or light craft, the Srinagar equivalent to the caïque of Stamboul, which was swiftly urged along by boatmen wielding heart-shaped paddles of wood; and the parinda, or ceremonial barge, where the occupant sits beneath a canopy near the bows, while behind him thirty or forty men sitting in two rows drive the boat with frantic energy through the water. European taste had been responsible for the recent introduction of house-boats, built very much upon the lines of an Oxford College Barge. Herein many of the foreign residents lived permanently, the interior being decorated by Kashmiri workmen with elegant panelling,

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