A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil Part 14

Near by, the mud and timber walls of a ziarat stand, softly brown, supporting a deeply overhanging, gra.s.s-grown roof, blazing with scarlet tulips. Through its very centre, and as though supporting it, pierces the gnarled trunk of a walnut tree, reminding one of Ygdrasil, the Upholder of the Universe.

_May_ 27.--What an improvement it would be if a house-dounga could be fitted with torpedo netting! Jane finds herself in the most embarra.s.sing situations, while dressing in the morning, from the unwelcome pertinacity of the merchants who swarm up the river in the early hours from their lairs, and lay themselves alongside the helpless house-boats.

By 10 A.M. we have to repel boarders in all directions. Mr. Sami Joo is endeavouring to sell boots from the bow, while Guffar Ali is pressing embroidery on our acceptance from the stern. Ali Jan is in a boat full of carved-wood rubbish on the starboard side, while Samad Shah, Sabhana, and half-a-dozen other robbers line the river bank opposite our port windows and clamour for custom. A powerful garden-hose of considerable calibre might be useful, but for the present I have given Sabz Ali orders to rig out long poles, which will prevent the enemy from so easily getting to close quarters.

_June_ 17.--It is quite curious that it should be so difficult to find time to keep up this journal. Mark Twain, in that best of burlesques, _The Innocents Abroad_ affirms, if I remember rightly, that you could not condemn your worst enemy to greater suffering than to bind him down to keep an accurate diary for a year.

It is the inexorable necessity for writing day by day one's impressions that becomes so trying; and yet it must be done daily if it is to be done at all, for the only virtue I can attain to in writing is truth; and impressions from memory, like sketches from memory, are of no value from the hand of any but a master.

The time set apart for diary-writing is the hour which properly intervenes between chota hasri and the announcement of my bath; but, somehow, there never seems to be very much time. Either the early tea is late or bath is early, or a shikar expedition, with a gra.s.s slipper in pursuit of flies, takes up the precious moments, and so the business of the day gets all behindhand.

The fly question is becoming serious. Personally, I do not consider that fleas, mosquitoes, or any other recognised insect pests (excepting, perhaps, harvest bugs) are so utterly unendurable as the "little, busy, thirsty fly." It seems odd, too, as he neither stings nor bites, that he should be so objectionable; but his tickly method of walking over your nose or down your neck, and the exasperating pertinacity with which he refuses to take "no" for an answer when you flick him delicately with a handkerchief, but "cuts" and comes again, maddens you until you rise, b.l.o.o.d.y-minded in your wrath, and, seizing the nearest sledgehammer, fall upon the brute as he sits twiddling his legs in a sunny patch on the table, then lo--

"Unwounded from the dreadful close "--

he frisks cheerfully away, leaving you to gather up cursefully the fragments of the china bowl your wife bought yesterday in the bazaar!

How he manages to congregate in his legions in this ship is a mystery.

Every window is guarded by "meat safe" blinds of wire gauze; the doors are, normally, kept shut; and yet, after one has swept round like an irate whirlwind with a gra.s.s slipper, and slain or desperately wounded every visible fly in the cabin, and at last sat down again to pant and paint, hoping for surcease from annoyance, not five minutes pa.s.s before one, two, nay, a round dozen of the miscreants are gaily licking the moisture off the cobalt (may they die in agony!), or trying to swim across the gla.s.s of water, or playing hop-scotch on the nape of my neck.

From what mysterious lair or hidden orifice they come I know not, but here they are in profusion until another ma.s.sacre of the innocents is decreed.

It is a sound thing to go round one's sleeping-cabin at night before "turning in," and make a bag of all that can be found "dreaming the happy hours away" on the bulkheads and ceiling. It sends us to bed in the virtuous frame of mind of the Village Blacksmith--

"Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night's repose"

There are other microbes besides flies in Kashmir which are exasperating--coolies, for instance.

I had engaged men through Chattar Singh (the State Transport factotum at Srinagar) to take us up the river, and decreed that we should start at 4 A.M. yesterday.

We had been to an _al fresco_ gathering at the Residency the night before, and so were rather sleepy in the early morning, and I did not wake at four o'clock. At six we had not got far on our way, and at ten we were but level with Pandrettan, barely three miles from Srinagar as the crow (that model of rectilinear volition) flies.

I was busy painting all the forenoon, and failed to note the sluggish steps of our coolies, but in the afternoon it was borne in upon us that if we wanted to reach Avantipura that night, as we had arranged, a little acceleration was necessary.

Then the trouble began. The coolies were bone-lazy, the admiral and first-lieutenant were sulky, and the weather was stuffy and threatened thunder--the conditions were altogether detrimental to placidity of temper.

By sunset we had the shikari, the kitchen-maid, and the sweeper on the tow-rope, and even the great and good Sabz Ali was seen to bear a hand in poling. Much recrimination now ensued between Sabz Ali and the Admiral, and the whole crowd made the air resound with Kashmiri "language," every one, apparently, abusing everybody else, and making very nasty remarks about their lady ancestors.

At 10 P.M. I got four more coolies from a village, apparently chiefly inhabited by dogs, who deeply resented our proximity, and at 2 o'clock this morning we reached the haven where we would be--Avantipura.

This morning I discharged the Srinagar coolies and took a fresh lot, who pull better and talk less.

How differently things may be put and yet the truth retained. Yesterday we reclined at our ease in our cosy floating cottage, towed up the lovely river by a picturesque crew of bronze Kashmiris, the swish of the pa.s.sing water only broken by their melodious voices. The brilliancy of the morning gave way in the afternoon to a soft haze which fell over the snowy ranges, mellowing their clear tones to a soft and pearly grey, while the reflections of the big chenars which graced the river bank deepened us the afternoon shadows lengthened and spread over the wide landscape. Towards evening we strolled along the river bank plucking the ripe mulberries, and idly watching the terns and kingfishers busily seeking their suppers over the gla.s.sy water; and at night we sat on deck while the moon rose higher in the quiet sky, and the dark river banks a.s.sumed a clearer ebony as she rose above the lofty fringe of trees, until the towing-path lay a track of pure silver reaching away to the dim belt of woodland which shrouded Avantipura.

That is a perfectly accurate description of the day, and so is this:--

It was very hot--and there is nothing hid from the heat of the sun on board a wooden house-dounga. The flies, too, were unusually malevolent, and I could scarcely paint, and my wife could hardly read by reason of their unwelcome attentions.

The coolies were a poor lot and a slack, and as the day grew stuffier and sultrier so did their efforts on the tow-path become "small by degrees and beautifully less."

That irrepressible bird--the old c.o.c.k--refused to consider himself as under arrest in his hen-coop, and insisted upon crowing about fifteen times a minute with that fidgeting irregularity which seems peculiar to certain unpleasant sounds, and which retains the ear fixed in nervous tension for the next explosion of defiance or pride, or whatever evil impulse it is which causes a c.o.c.k to crow.

Driven overboard by the c.o.c.k, and a feeling that exercise would be beneficial, we landed in the afternoon, and plodded along the bank for some miles. The innumerable mulberry trees are loaded with ripe fruit, the ground below being literally black with fallen berries. We ate some, and p.r.o.nounced them to be but mawkish things.

After dinner we sat on deck, as the lamp smelt too strongly to let us enjoy ourselves in the cabin, and the coolies on the bank and the people in our boat and those in the cook-boat engaged in a triangular duel of words, until the last few grains of my patience ran through the gla.s.s, and I spake with _my_ tongue.

There is certainly some curious quality in the air of this country which affects the nerves: maybe it is the elevation at which one lives--certain it is that many people complain of unwonted irritability and susceptibility to petty annoyances. And, while travelling in Kashmir is easy and comfortable enough along beaten tracks, yet the petty worries connected with all matters of transport and supply are incessant, and become much more serious if one cannot speak or understand Hindustani.

It takes some little time for the Western mind to grasp the fact that the Kashmiri cannot and must not be treated on the "man and brothel" principle.

He is by nature a slave, and his brain is in many respects the undeveloped brain of a child; in certain ways, however, his outward childishness conceals the subtlety of the Heathen Chinee.

He has in no degree come to comprehend the dignity of labour any more than a Poplar pauper comprehends it, but fortunately his Guardians, while granting certain advantages in his tenure of land and payment of rent, have bound him, in return, to work for a fair payment, when required to do so by his Government, as exercised by the local Tehsildhar.

The demand made upon a village for coolies is not, therefore, an arbitrary and high-handed system of bullying, but simply a call upon the villages to fulfil their obligation towards the State by doing a fair day's work for a fair day's pay of from four to six annas.

I do not, of course, propose to entangle myself in the working of the Land Settlement, which is most fully and admirably explained in Lawrence's _Valley of Kashmir_.

The coolie, drawn from his native village reluctant, like a periwinkle from its sh.e.l.l, is never a good starter, and when he finds himself at the end of a tow-rope or bowed beneath half a hundredweight of the sahib's trinkets, with a three-thousand-feet pa.s.s to attain in front of him, he is extremely apt to burst into tears--idle tears--or be overcome by a fit of that fell disease--"the lurgies." Lest my reader should not be acquainted with this illness, at least under that name, here is the diagnosis of the lurgies as given by a very ordinary seaman to the ship's doctor.

"Well, sir, I eats well, and I sleeps well; but when I've got a job of work to do--Lor' bless you, sir! I breaks out all over of a tremble!"

CHAPTER X

THE LIDAR VALLEY

We were glad enough to leave Srinagar, as that place has been undoubtedly trying lately, being extremely hot and relaxing. The river, which had been up to the fourteen-foot level, as shown on the gate ports at the entrance to the Sunt-i-kul Ca.n.a.l, had fallen to 9-1/2 feet, and the mud, exposed both on its banks and in the fields and flats which had been flooded, must have given out unwholesome exhalations, of which the riverine population, the dwellers in house-boats and doungas, got the full benefit.

Jane has certainly been anything but well lately, and I confess to a certain feeling best described as "slack and livery."

We had not intended to remain nearly so long in Srinagar, but the continuity of the chain of entertainments proved too firm to break, and dances and dinners, bridge and golf, kept us bound from day to day, until the _fete_ at the Residency on the 15th practically brought the Srinagar season to a close, and broke up the line of house-boats that had been moored along both banks of the river.

We had arranged to start with a party of three other boats up the river, visiting Atchibal with our friends, and then going up the Lidar Valley, while they retraced their way to Srinagar.

The most popular bachelor in Kashmir was appointed commodore, and deputed to set the pace and arrange rendezvous. He began by sending on his big house-boat, dragged by many coolies, to Pampur, a distance of some ten miles by water, and, following himself on horseback by road, inst.i.tuted a sort of "Devil take the hindmost" race, for which we were not prepared.

On reaching Pampur we heard that the "Baltic Fleet" had sailed for Avantipura, so we followed on; but, alas! having made a forced march to this latter place, we found that Rodjestvenski Phelps had again escaped us and "gone before."

We consigned him and the elusive "chota resident," who was in command of the rest of the party, to perdition, and decided to pursue the even tenor of our way to the Lidar Valley.

The upper reaches of the Jhelum tire not wildly or excitingly lovely. The narrowed waters, like sweet Thames, run softly between quiet British banks, willow veiled. The wide level flats of the lower river give place to low sloping hills or "karewas," which fall in terraced undulations from the foothills of the higher ranges which close in the eastern extremity of the Kashmir Valley.

It was well into the evening, and the sun had just set, throwing a glorious rosy flush over the snows which surround the Lidar Valley, when we came to the picturesque bridge which crosses the stream at Bejbehara.

The scene here was charming--a grand festa or religious tamasha being toward; the whole river was swarming with boats--great doungas, with their festive crews yelling a monotonous chant, paddled uproariously by. Light shikaras darted in and out, making up for want of volume in their song by the piercing shrillness of their utterances. The banks and bridge teemed with swarming life, and all Kashmir seemed to have contributed its noisiest members to the revel.