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Updated: August 21, 2024
The other bridges were all easier than the first, and we shot them gaily, spending the rest of the day in floating quietly down the river, and finally anchoring or rather mooring, for anchors are, like boat-hooks, masts, sails, rudders, and rigging, alike unknown to the "jollye mariners" of the Jhelum some two or three miles above the entrance to the dreaded Wular Lake.
No coolies being forthcoming, I inhumanly gave orders to get under way the available crew consisting of the wicked Satarah, the first lieutenant, and the Lady Jiggry. Sulkily and slowly we wended our way past the wide flats which border the Wular, all blazing golden with mustard in full pungent flower.
The place where we tied up was not far from the point where the Jhelum expands into the Wular Lake a broad expanse of water, some seven or eight miles wide in places, which holds the proud record of being the largest lake in all India.
At another point, fifteen miles below Srinagar, ruins and fragments of pottery have been exhumed at a great depth. One of these oscillations appears to be now, or to have been within two centuries, in progress. Lake Wúlar has grown shallower, its present average depth being forty feet.
The Wular lay like a burnished mirror, reflecting the buttresses of Haramok on our right, and the snowy ranges by the Tragbal ahead, its silvery surface lined here and there with the wavering tracks of other boats, or broken by bristling clumps of reeds and tall water-plants.
Before the sun rose over Apharwat, his shafts struck the higher snows and turned them rosy; while the lower slopes, their distant pines suffused with strong purple, stood reflected in the placid mirror of the lake. "Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye," but seldom a more lovely one than this our last on the Wular Lake.
I explained to her that I would certainly do what I could for her with a dredge in the Wular when I came down, but she preferred, she said, not to put me to any inconvenience in the matter.
At the foot of the valley up which we had come yesterday, and partly screened by the intruding buttresses of its enfolding hills, the Wular Lake lay a shimmering shield of molten silver.
These squalls are said to be most frequent in the afternoons, and are probably the accompaniments of the thunderstorms. It is only considered possible to cross the Wular between dawn and 10 or 11 A.M., and no persuasion will prevail upon a native boatman to risk his life on the lake after lunch.
First, however, we begin by a gentle and pleasant descent down the Jhelam to Lake Wúlar. Then begins the trouble. We turn northward, and find ourselves at the end of the first stage four thousand feet above the valley, on the brink of an artificial sheet of water surrounded by dense evergreen woods.
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