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He insisted that it was too late to think of reaching Bandipur, but we maintained that we could get at any rate part of the way; so he cast off from his willow-tree, and sulkily poked and poled out into the Wular, taking uncommon good care to hug the shore with fervour.
An interview with the Admiral showed me that the Wular, in his opinion, was too dangerous to cross to-day in fact he wouldn't dream of asking coolies to risk it. He was given to understand that we intended to cross, and that the sooner he started the safer it would be.
Reaching Sumbal at sunset, we turned to the left down a narrow canal, and soon the Wular lay a sheet of molten gold upon our right; and by the time we had moored alongside a low strip of reedy bank, the glorious rosy lights had faded from the snows of the Pir Panjal, and their royal purple and gold had turned to soft ebony against the primrose of the sky.
We had to leave just as the gorgeous autumn colouring was beginning to blaze in the woods, and the first duck were wheeling over the Wular Lake. The climate of Kashmir is fairly similar to that of many parts of Southern Europe. There is a good deal of snow in the valley in winter.
Eastern poets and historians speak of it as a garden collectively, and lavish their most brilliant powers of description on the gardens which make it up in detail the gardens of the terraced hills, the gardens of the broad alluvial plain, and the floating gardens of the lakes Wúlar and Dal.
For an hour or so we kept climbing up what was evidently one of the many steep and rugged ranges which, radiating from Haramok, on this side flank the Wular with their lofty bastions.
Opposite, through a maze of leafless trees, one caught occasional gleams of water where the winding reaches of the river flowed gently from the turquoise haze where lay the Wular Lake, and beyond clear and pale in the clear, crisp air shone a glorious range of snow mountains, stretching away past where we knew Srinagar must lie, to be lost in the distant haze where sky and mountain merged in the north-east.
From Ismaïlabad, near the head of the valley, and fifty-four hundred feet above the level of the sea, the fall to Srinagar, thirty miles, is seventy-five feet; and from the capital to Lake Wúlar, twenty-four miles below, only fifty-five feet declivities in marked contrast with the fall of two thousand eight hundred feet in eighty miles from the edge of the plateau at Baramúla to the plain of the Panjab.
We were about 1500 feet above the Wular Lake, and snow lay in thick patches within a few yards of our tents, and had obviously only melted quite recently from the site of the camp, leaving more clammy mud about the place than we really required.
However I was hopeful, as I have noticed that in the fine forenoons a thick white belt of cloud often forms about the snow level roughly, some 8000 feet above the sea, or 3000 above the Wular Lake and hangs there for an hour or two, to disappear entirely by midday.
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