Category: Travel Writing
I observe that it is customary to begin a book by an Introduction, Preface, or Foreword. In the good old days of the eighteenth century this generally took the form of a burst of grovelling adoration aimed at some most noble or otherwise highly important person. This fulsome f...
We arrived, very sleepy and gritty, at Chitor at 5.30 A.M., to find an unprecedented mob of first-class passengers _en route_ for Udaipur, and only one very minute compartment i...
10. Chapter 10_May_ 1.—The pear and cherry blossom has been so lovely in and around Srinagar that we determined to go to the Lolab Valley and see the apple blossom in full flower.
17. Chapter 17The journey down was uneventful, and quite unlike the journey up, when we had been briskly occupied in dodging landslips for days. A good road, white and dry, and sloping steadi...
12. Chapter 12We were glad enough to leave Srinagar, as that place has been undoubtedly trying lately, being extremely hot and relaxing. The river, which had been up to the fourteen-foot leve...
16. Chapter 16Wednesday, _September_ 27.—We left Srinagar yesterday, very sorry indeed to part from the many good friends we have made and left there. Truly Kashmir is a hospitable country, a...
8. Chapter 8The fleet, consisting of four sail (I use this word in its purely conventional sense, a dounga having no more sails than a battleship), got under way about 5 A.M., while it was...
14. Chapter 14Somehow one’s preconceived ideas of a place are almost always quite wrong, and so Gulmarg seemed quite different from what I had expected. It seemed all twisted the wrong way, a...
9. Chapter 9Easter Day, _April_ 23.—We left the Erin district early in the morning following the bara singh fiasco, and punted and poled up the river to join the Smithsons in a last attack...
6. Chapter 6The road took us along the left bank of the river, whose soil-stained waters churned their way through a wild and rocky gorge. On our left the mountain rose bare and steep, frin...
13. Chapter 13Friday, _June_ 30.—The last few days have been somewhat uneventful. We left Pahlgam at early dawn on Wednesday, just as the first lemon-coloured light was spreading in the east...
15. Chapter 15Tuesday, _September_ 12.—A second edition of the Noachian deluge is upon us! It began to rain on Saturday, at the close of a hot and stuffy week, and, having succeeded in thorou...
4. Chapter 4This morning we awoke to find ourselves rattling and shaking our way through the Sind Desert—an interminable waste of sand, barren and thirsty-looking, covered with a patchy scr...
3. Chapter 3It seems extraordinary to me that every day throughout the winter, crowds of people should throng the railway stations whence they can hurry south in search of warmth and sunshi...
7. Chapter 7We learnt that the earthquake of this morning was far more than the ordinary affair that we had taken it to be. The hotel showed signs of a struggle for existence. Large cracks...
2. Chapter 2A journey to Kashmir now—in these days of cheap and rapid locomotion—is in nowise serious. It takes time, I grant you, but to any one with a few months to spare—and there are ma...
11. Chapter 11We have spent the last three weeks or so quietly in Srinagar, our boats forming links in the long chain that, during the “season,” extends for miles along both banks of the rive...
5. Chapter 5Dismal tidings came in of floods and storms on the Hassan Abdal road. The river had swollen, and both men and beasts had been swept away while trying to cross. Undeterred, howev...
1. Chapter 1I observe that it is customary to begin a book by an Introduction, Preface, or Foreword. In the good old days of the eighteenth century this generally took the form of a burst o...