A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil Part 22

The horses being unharnessed, we sent the drivers with one of them forward to look for help, and Hesketh and Jane proceeded to make tea while I sat by the roadside and sketched.

Presently an empty dandy came "dribbling by" on its return journey to Gulmarg, and it was immediately impressed for the benefit of the lame.

Hardly had we packed him in, when a wandering tonga hove in sight, and, being promptly requisitioned, we rattled off the five miles which lay between us and Margam in no time.

Here we found a large party a.s.sembled in the little rest-house. Colonel and Mrs. Maxwell (who had kindly sent us back the tonga on hearing of the breakdown); Mr. and Mrs. Allen Baines, whose dandy had been the means of bringing Hesketh along; and Sadleir-Jackson, and Edwards of the 9th Lancers.

The bungalow was full, but I found out that one room was appropriated by a coming event, who had cast his shadow before him in the guise of a bearer.

This being contrary to the etiquette as observed in dak bungalows, I gently but firmly cleared out the neatly arranged toilet things and ready-made bed; while Hesketh was taken over, somewhat shattered by his tedious though exciting day, by his fellow Lancers.

The resources of the little place were severely strained; dinner was a scanty meal, and soda-water gave out almost immediately: nevertheless, a cheroot and a rubber of bridge sent us contented to bed.

Yesterday (Friday) the question of how to proceed arose. The road was reported to be impa.s.sable after about five miles, the remaining ten being under water.

We set out after breakfast, Jane perched on a pony which Sabz Ali had raised or stolen, Hesketh in the dandy, and I on foot. After a warm five miles' march we came upon signs of a block. Vehicles of many and strange sorts were drawn up in the shade of a chenar, under whose wide branches the Baines family was faring sumptuously on biscuits and brandy and water.

Horses, goats, and cattle strayed around, and a chattering mob of natives, busily engaged, as usual, in doing nothing, completed the picture.

Hesketh was reduced to despair; after two months in bed, this could not but be a trying journey under the most favourable circ.u.mstances, and the prospect as held out by his pessimistic bearer was pretty gloomy--no boats available, and no signs of our doungas.

I pushed on to the break in search of my shikari, whom I had sent on by pony early in the morning, and soon found that estimable person, who is not really the blithering idiot he looks!

In the first place, he had appropriated the only two shikaras he could find, and our baggage was already being stowed in them; secondly, he had discovered both Juma and Ismala, our Mangis, who reported the doungas moored below Parana Chaum, about four miles away over the flooded fields.

This was good news, and we ate a cheerful lunch under a tree densely populated by jackdaws.

The Maxwells got away somehow in search of their house-boat, which was supposed to have left Baramula some days ago. They started cheerfully, but vaguely, down the Spill Ca.n.a.l, and we trust they found their ark somewhere!

Promising to send back a boat for the Baines, we paid and dismissed coolies and ponies, and paddled away over the flood water. The country was simply a vast lake, the main road merely marked by a dense row of poplars.

Trees rose promiscuously out of the calm and sunlit water, wisps of maize and wreckage clinging to their lower boughs. Presently the road showed in patches, a broad waterfall breaking it every here and there as the imprisoned waters from above sought the slightly lower channel of the Jhelum.

We pa.s.sed a party of natives bivouacking near the roof and upper storey of their wooden hut, which, floating from above, was held up by the Baramula road. Sounding now and then with our khudsticks, we found no bottom over the submerged rice crops, though we could see plainly the laden ears waving dismally down below. This is nothing less than a great calamity for the owners, as the rice was just ready for gathering.

Towards dusk we arrived at our ships, calmly lying moored to poplar trees by the roadside, and right gladly did we clamber on board, for our invalid was pretty well f.a.gged out.

This morning we cast loose from our poplars, and brought the fleet up to within half a mile of the seventh bridge, or, rather, of the spot where the seventh bridge used to be, for all but a fragment has been washed away!

The strong current prevented us from getting any higher up the river in our doungas. Jane and I, however, were anxious to see what appearance Srinagar presented, so we manned the shikara with five able-bodied paddlers and pushed our way upwards. Turning into a side ca.n.a.l we pa.s.sed a demolished bridge, and tried to force our way up a small but swift stream.

Failing to make anything of it, we landed and had the boat carried over into a wider channel. Three times we were obliged to get out and leave our stalwart crew to force the boat on somehow, and they did it well--hauling, paddling, and shouting invocations to various saints, particularly the one whose name sounds like "jam paws!"

The water had already fallen some four or five feet, but there was plenty left. A great break in the bund between Nusserwanjee's shop and the Punjab Bank allowed us to paddle into the flooded European quarter, past the telegraph office, standing knee-deep in muddy water, up over the main road to Nedou's Hotel, where boats lay moored outside the dining-room windows, then across the lagoon, lightly rippled by a tiny breeze, beneath which lay the polo-ground, to the Residency, where we landed to inspect damages.

The water had been all over the lower storey, but a muddy deposit on the wooden floor, and a brown slimy high-water mark on the door jambs, alone remained to show what had happened. The piano had been hoisted upon a table, carpets and curtains bundled upstairs, and everything, apparently, saved. The poor garden, with its slime-daubed shrubs, broken palings and torn creepers, trailing wisps of draggled foliage in the oozy brown pools, was a sad and pitiful sight, especially when mentally contrasted with the glowing glory of asters and zinneas which it should have been.

The flood has been nearly as bad as the great one of 1903. Fortunately the Spill Ca.n.a.l, cut above Srinagar to carry off the flood water, took off some of the pressure; the bund, also, is three feet higher than it was then, but it gave way in two places--one somewhere near the top, and the other just below the Bank, letting in the river to a depth of ten feet over the low-lying quarter. The stream is now falling fast, and, after doing a little shopping and visiting the post-office, which is temporarily established on the bund in the midst of an amazing litter of desks, boxes, and queer pigeon-holes admirably adapted to lose letters by the score, we spun swiftly down the rushing stream to tea and our cosy dounga.

_Monday, September_ 18.--It was impossible to get our boats up the river yesterday, so I spent the day sketching amidst the most picturesque, but horribly smelly, part of the town; much quinine in the evening seemed desirable as a counterblast to possible malaria.

The sunsets lately have been really magnificent; the poplars and chenars, darkly olive, reflected in the flooded fields against a red gold sky, in the foreground the black silhouettes of the armada.

The days are almost too hot, but the nights are cool and delicious, and the mosquitoes are only noticeable for a brief period of sinful activity about sundown, after which the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.

At half-past ten this morning we set sail; that is to say, we hired nine extra coolies and a second shikara to tow, and advanced on Srinagar.

Hesketh's boat, being the lighter, kept well ahead (here let me note that "bow" in that boat is quite the prettiest girl we have seen in Kashmir, and the minx knows it!), but we had good men, and worked along slowly and steadily up the main river, the side ca.n.a.ls being all choked by broken bridges and such like. We crept past the Amira Kadal, or first bridge, about two o'clock, and tied up for lunch, revelling in the most perfect pears, peaches, and walnuts. As a rule the Kashmir fruit is disappointing; abundant and cheap certainly, but not by any means of first-rate quality.

Strawberries, cherries, apricots, melons, and grapes might all be far better if properly cultivated, and scientifically improved from European stock.

The pears alone defy criticism, and the apples, I am told, are excellent also.

Vegetables are in great plenty, but, like the fruit, would be much improved by good cultivation.

_Wednesday, September_ 25.--The abomination of desolation wrought by the flood is borne in upon one more and more as an inspection of the town reveals the damage done more fully--the houses standing empty, their lower storeys dank and slimy, the ruined gardens, and muddy, slippery roads. The wrecked garden of the Punjab Bank is one of the saddest sights, and must be a painful spectacle to Mr. Harrison, whose joy it was to spend time and money on importing exotic and improving indigenous plants.

One cannot help reflecting how desperately depressed Noah, and the probably more impressionable Mrs. Noah, must have been when, discarding their aquascutums for the first time, they sallied forth, a primeval party, to observe the emerging country.

Mrs. Noah, tucking up the curious straight garment that is a memory of our childhood, went ahead with feminine curiosity; Noah, bare-legged, slithering along in the rear and beseeching the ladies to note the slipperiness of the alluvial deposit, and for goodness' sake not to make a glissade down the side of Ararat.

I feel confident they must have taken great precautions, for Sabz Ali slipped up on the shelving bank of the Jhelum, and, had he not caught the gunwale of our dounga in his descent, would most certainly have had to swim for his life--which I doubt if he can do!

Now, Shem and Co. were as valuable to Noah as Sabz Ali is to us, and I should not be surprised if he made them travel on all-fours in the risky places. Fathers were very dictatorial in those days, and there was n.o.body about to make them consider their dignity.

One can imagine the scene. Ararat, a muddy pyramid dotted here and there with olive trees--curious, by the way, to find olives so high!--in the receding waters the vagrant raven cheerfully picking out the eye of a defunct pterodactyl. The heavy clouds rolling off the sodden world--they must have indeed been heavy clouds, nimbus of the first water--as they had raised the world's water-level 250 feet per day during "the flood" ...

surely a record output!

The primeval family party, sadly poking about along the expanding margin of the world, noting how Abel Brown's tall chimney was beginning to show, and how Cain Jones' wigwam was clean gone. Mrs. Shem said she knew it would, the mortar work had been so terribly scamped.

And Naboth Robinson's vineyard--well, _it_ was in a pretty mess, to be sure, and serve him right, for Mrs. Noah had frequently offered him two of her (second) best milch mammoths for it; yet he had held on to his nasty sour grapes, like the mean old curmudgeon that he was.

And now Hammy must set to work and tidy it up; and oh! what lots of nice manure was floating about, all for nothing the cartload ... And so the primeval family felt better, and went back to the ark to tea, feeling almost cheerful, but rather lonesome.

Fortunately this great flood did little injury to life or limb. A certain amount of destruction of crops and other property was inevitable, but on the whole the loss was not so great as was at one time feared, and much was saved that at first seemed irreparable.

A well-known lady artist came near to giving the note of tragedy to the British community, and losing the number of her mess (to use a nautical, and therefore appropriate expression) by reason of a big willow tree, beneath whose shady boughs she had moored her floating studio. This hapless tree, having all its sustenance swept from beneath by the greedy water, came down with a crash in the night upon the confiding house-boat, and all but swamped it.

The cook-boat, occupied as usual by a pair of prolific Mangis and their large small family, was saved by the proverbial "acid drop"--the children crawling out somehow or anyhow from among the branches of the fallen tree.

The fair artist, having with shrieks invoked the aid of a neighbour, he promptly descended from his roof or other temporary camp, and helped her with basins and chatties to bale out the half-swamped boat. The lady is now safely moored to the mudbank on the other side of the river where willow trees do not grow.

The whole bund is in a very unsafe state: it was raised three feet after the last flood, but its width was not increased correspondingly. Now that the water has fallen, great fissures and subsidences have appeared, and in many places large portions of the bank have fallen away, carrying big trees with them.

[1] Our pet name for Shikari Mark II., who reigns in the stead of Ahmed Bot, sacked for expensive inefficiency.

CHAPTER XIV

THE MACHIPURA