After dinner we sat on deck, as the lamp smelt too strongly to let us enjoy ourselves in the cabin, and the coolies on the bank and the people in our boat and those in the cook-boat engaged in a triangular duel of words, until the last few grains of my patience ran through the glass, and I spake with my tongue.

There is certainly some curious quality in the air of this country which affects the nerves:  maybe it is the elevation at which one lives—­certain it is that many people complain of unwonted irritability and susceptibility to petty annoyances.  And, while travelling in Kashmir is easy and comfortable enough along beaten tracks, yet the petty worries connected with all matters of transport and supply are incessant, and become much more serious if one cannot speak or understand Hindustani.

It takes some little time for the Western mind to grasp the fact that the Kashmiri cannot and must not be treated on the “man and brothel” principle.

He is by nature a slave, and his brain is in many respects the undeveloped brain of a child; in certain ways, however, his outward childishness conceals the subtlety of the Heathen Chinee.

He has in no degree come to comprehend the dignity of labour any more than a Poplar pauper comprehends it, but fortunately his Guardians, while granting certain advantages in his tenure of land and payment of rent, have bound him, in return, to work for a fair payment, when required to do so by his Government, as exercised by the local Tehsildhar.

The demand made upon a village for coolies is not, therefore, an arbitrary and high-handed system of bullying, but simply a call upon the villages to fulfil their obligation towards the State by doing a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay of from four to six annas.

I do not, of course, propose to entangle myself in the working of the Land Settlement, which is most fully and admirably explained in Lawrence’s Valley of Kashmir.

The coolie, drawn from his native village reluctant, like a periwinkle from its shell, is never a good starter, and when he finds himself at the end of a tow-rope or bowed beneath half a hundredweight of the sahib’s trinkets, with a three-thousand-feet pass to attain in front of him, he is extremely apt to burst into tears—­idle tears—­or be overcome by a fit of that fell disease—­“the lurgies.”  Lest my reader should not be acquainted with this illness, at least under that name, here is the diagnosis of the lurgies as given by a very ordinary seaman to the ship’s doctor.

“Well, sir, I eats well, and I sleeps well; but when I’ve got a job of work to do—­Lor’ bless you, sir!  I breaks out all over of a tremble!”

CHAPTER X

THE LIDAR VALLEY

We 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 level, as shown on the gate ports at the entrance to the Sunt-i-kul Canal, had fallen to 9-1/2 feet, and the mud, exposed both on its banks and in the fields and flats which had been flooded, must have given out unwholesome exhalations, of which the riverine population, the dwellers in house-boats and doungas, got the full benefit.