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The road towards Pahlgam is a charming woodland walk, where the wild strawberries, still hardly out of flower, grow thick amidst a tangle of chestnut, yew, wild cherry, and flowering shrubs. Overhead and to the right the rocky steeps rise abruptly until they culminate in the crags of Kohinar, and on the left the snow-fed Lidar roars "through the cloven ravine in cataract after cataract."
The waters came down, swollen full and dark, with rapid rushing speed from the snow-fed springs high up on the moorland above. The close-packed houses in the old town seemed a cluster of white roofs irregularly piled against the more unbroken white of the hill-side. Lights twinkled here and there in the town, and were slung from stern and bow of the ships in the harbour.
As always when his heart was in the words, the scenery about us faded and I lived the adventure with him. The cowled and hooded chimneys turned to trees, the stretch of dim star-lit London Park became a deep Caucasian vale, the thunder of the traffic was the roaring of the snow-fed torrents. The very perfume of strange flowers floated in the air.
We arrived a little before four o'clock at the end of our day's journey, hot enough to justify the step, taking by most of the PARTIE, of plunging into the crystal water of the snow-fed lake.
Sometimes she wondered if the sound of running water had this stultifying effect upon her, for wherever they went it followed them. The snow-fed streams ran everywhere, and since leaving Srinagar she could not remember a single occasion on which they had been out of earshot of their perpetual music. It haunted her like a ceaseless refrain, but yet she never wearied of it.
It was essentially a middle-aged devotion, and bore the same resemblance to the picturesque passion of five-and- twenty that a snow-fed torrent does to a navigable river. The one rushes and roars and sweeps away the bridges and devastates happy homes, while the other bears upon its placid breast the argosies of peace and plenty and is generally serviceable to the necessities of man.
The Brahmaputra received three small snow-fed tributaries descending from the steep mountains on either side of us. Where the main stream turned sharply south, a fourth and important tributary, carrying a large volume of water, came down through a gorge from the north-north-east. We encamped near the junction of these rivers, on the right bank of the main stream, at an elevation of 16,620 feet.
There are but two, a kind of rat, which is now banished by the Norway rat, and an animal of either the otter or beaver species, which is known rather by rumour than by actual certainty. The fishes, too, will give us little trouble. There are only a sort of minnow and an eel. This last grows to a great size, and is abundant even in the clear, rapid, snow-fed rivers.
Any adventurous men, who may top that barrier, see nothing before them but range beyond range of snow Alps, intersected by precipitous cliffs, and frightful chasms. This westward range is called the Bougongs. They used to report that a fine available country lies to the east embosomed in mountains, rendered fertile by perpetual snow-fed streams.
But in the heaven the peaks of snow were rosy, glistening like transcendent, radiant spikes of blossom in the heavenly upper-world, so lovely and beyond. Gudrun saw all their loveliness, she KNEW how immortally beautiful they were, great pistils of rose-coloured, snow-fed fire in the blue twilight of the heaven. She could SEE it, she knew it, but she was not of it.
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