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 darkened into a stifling
night we made fast to a reed bed, not reaching Ganderbal till late
the next morning, where my horse and caravan awaited me under a
splendid plane-tree.
For the next five days we marched up the Sind Valley, one of the most
beautiful in Kashmir from its grandeur and variety. Beginning among
quiet rice-fields and brown agricultural villages at an altitude of
5,000 feet, the track, usually bad and sometimes steep and perilous,
passes through flower-gemmed alpine meadows, along dark gorges above
the booming and rushing Sind, through woods matted with the sweet
white jasmine, the lower hem of the pine and deodar forests which
ascend the mountains to a considerable altitude, past rifts giving
glimpses of dazzling snow-peaks, over grassy slopes dotted with
villages, houses, and shrines embosomed in walnut groves, in sight of
the frowning crags of Haramuk, through wooded lanes and park-like
country over which farms are thinly scattered, over unrailed and
shaky bridges, and across avalanche slopes, till it reaches
Gagangair, a dream of lonely beauty, with a camping-ground of velvety
sward under noble plane-trees.
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