expenses of living and the discomforts of travel greater than they had expected. And some have arrived when it was raining or cloudy, and the snows were not visible; or in the middle of summer when the valley is hazy, steamy, and filled with mosquitoes, But when the clouds have rolled by, the haze lifted, and a real Kashmir spring or autumn day disclosed itself, the heart of the hardest visitor melteth and he becometh as Bernier.
The present book will deal, not with the whole Kashmir State, which includes many outlying provinces, but with Kashmir Proper—with the world-renowned Vale of Kashmir, a saucer-shaped valley with a length of 84 miles, a breadth of 20 to 25 miles, and a mean height of 5600 feet above sea-level, set in the very heart of the Himalaya, and corresponding in latitude to Damascus, to Fez in Morocco, and to South Carolina.
The country with which one is most apt to compare it is, naturally, Switzerland. And Switzerland, indeed, has a combination of lake and mountain in which, I think, it excels Kashmir. But it is built on a smaller scale. There is not the same wide sweep of snowclad mountains. There is no place where one can see a complete circle of snowy mountains surrounding a plain of anything like
