Crossing the stream which tumbled down the valley, by a somewhat “wobbly” bridge, and picking our way through the mixen which forms the approach to every well-appointed hut, we arrived upon the roof which supported the tent.  This we achieved without any undue trouble, the building, like most “gujar” homes, being constructed on the side of a hill sufficiently steep to obviate the necessity for any back wall—­the rear of the roof springing directly from the hillside.  A Gujar village, owing to this peculiarity of construction, always looks oddly like a deposit of great half-open oysters clinging to the face of the hill.

After a welcome lunch, the ladies both pronounced decidedly against remaining in or near the highly-scented precincts of the village.  The argument that there was no flat ground excepting roofs to be seen was overruled; so Walter and I climbed a neighbouring ridge, and selected a site on the crest.

It was not, certainly, a very good site for a camp, as it was so narrow that the unwary might easily step over the edge on either side, and toboggan gracefully either back on top of the aforesaid roof, or forward into a very rocky-bedded stream which employed its superfluous energy in tossing some frayed and battered logs from boulder to boulder, and which would have rejoiced greatly in doing the same to a fallen nestling from the eyry above.

Neither was the ridge level, and our tents were pitched at such an angle that the slumberer whose grasp of the bed-head relaxed

  “In the mist and shadow of sleep”

was brought to wakefulness by finding his toes gently sliding out into the nipping and eager air of night.

The holding-ground for the tent-pegs was not all that could be desired, and visions of our tents spreading their wings in the gale and vanishing into space haunted us.

No—­it was not an ideal camping-ground, and Jane, whose rosy dreams of camping in Kashmir had pictured her little white canvas home set up in a flowery mead by the side of a purling brook, gazed upon the rugged slopes which rose around—­the cold snow gleaming through the shaggy pine-trees—­with a shiver and a distinct air of disapproval.

It grew more than chilly too, as the sun dipped early behind the ridge that rose jealous between us and the western light, and an icy breeze from the snow came stealing down the gorge and whispering among the taller tree-tops in the nullah at our feet.

We were about 1500 feet above the Wular Lake, and snow lay in thick patches within a few yards of our tents, and had obviously only melted quite recently from the site of the camp, leaving more clammy mud about the place than we really required.

As it is reasonable to suppose that the bilingual lady who composes the fashion columns of the Daily Horror is most anxious to know how the fair sex was accoutred at our dinner party that night, I hasten to inform her that Charlotte was gowned in an elegant confection of Puttoo of a simply indescribable nuance of creme de boue—­the train, extremely decolletee at the lower end, cunningly revealing at every turn glimpses of an enchanting pair of frou-frou putties.