April 5.—­We crept shivering to our beds last night, to be awakened at 6 A.M. by an earthquake!

I had just realised what the untoward commotion meant when I heard Jane from under her “resai” ask, “What is the matter—­is it an earthquake?” Almost before I could reply, she was up and away, in a fearful hurry and very little else, towards the open country.

I followed, but finding hoar-frost on the ground and a nipping eagerness in the air, I went back for a “resai.”  The feeling was that of going into one’s cabin in a breeze of wind, and the door was flapping about.  Seizing the wrap in some haste, as I was afraid of the door jamming, I rejoined Jane in the open, to watch the poplars swaying like drunken men and the solid earth bulging unpleasantly.  The shock lasted for three minutes, and when it seemed quite over we retired to our beds to try to get warm again.

The morning at breakfast-time was perfectly beautiful.  Baramula lay serenely mirrored in the silver waters of the Jhelum, its picturesque brown wooden houses clustering on both banks, and joining hands by means of a long brown wooden bridge.  No signs of any unusual disturbance could be seen among the chattering crews of the snaky little boats and deep-laden “doungas” that lined the banks or furrowed the waters of the shining river.

We left Baramula in high spirits to accomplish the five-and-thirty miles which still stretched between us and Srinagar.  The scenery was quite different from anything we had yet known, for now we were in the broad flat valley of Kashmir, which stretches for some eighty miles from beyond Islamabad, on the N.E., to Baramula, planted at the neck where the Jhelum River, after spreading itself abroad through the fertile plain, concentrates to pour its many waters through the mountain barrier until it joins the Indus far away in Sind.

A broad and level road stretched straight and white between a double row of stark poplars, reminding one of the poplar-guarded ways of Picardy; also (as in France) not only were the miles marked, but also the thirty-two subdivisions thereof.  On the right hand the ground sloped slowly up in a succession of wooded heights, the foothills of the Pir Panjal, whose snow-crowned peaks enclose the Kashmir valley on the south.  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.

By the roadside we passed many small lakes, or “jheels,” full of duck, but as there was never any cover by the sides I could not see how the duck were to be approached.