glances at their comely features and their turquoise-decked tresses. The men were genial, frank, and dirty. We once more had become sensitive in the matter of cleanliness,—we could again criticise the unwashed,—for had we not bathed? Yea, at the first village, riding up the mountain-side near a high-perched monastery, we found a hot spring, a blessed gift from the Plutonian deeps ! The awful need which it subserved, the revelling joy which it produced, give to that water a perennial current through memory's greenest field.
The Maharajah of Kashmir was mighty enough to send conquering armies from Srinagar, sixteen marches distant from Leh, and reduce a country whose military vigour had been sapped for ages by partial application of the non-resistance principle—dear to the hearts of Gautama and of Jesus. But the Maharajah himself was not mighty enough to escape the "protection" of a valorous European people whose hearts, like those of all their brethren, have never learned to love humility. So it came to pass that in Panamirgh, twenty marches distant from the nearest permanent British official, we came upon a proclamation of King Edward's enthronement, avouched in proper English and hung in the dak-bungalow. In such strange and outcast places do the antenn e that radiate from London and Pekin now learn to touch each other, to irritate, withdraw, return, first at Leh, then at Lhasa, then farther afield.
Thrusting aside all contemplation of the eventual, the probable, and the vexed ethical, we rode merrily on through this valley of sumptuous scenery,
IIIF Color HighRes
