Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878, page 29 by Various Authors
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ot or so long, of iron. We may suppose the father of Frederick the Great to have had in mind this passage of Oriental life when he forced the prince to witness the execution of his young friend Katte.
Wilson's preference is for the Garden of Pleasure, notwithstanding the elegance of that of Delight. It looks out upon Lake Dal, the Golden Island in front:
"Ten terraces, bounded by magnificent trees and with a stream of water falling over them, lead up to the latticed pavilion at the end of this garden. Between the double stories of this pavilion the stream flows through a marble--or at least a limestone--tank, and the structure is shaded by great chunár trees, while through a vista of their splendid foliage we look down the terraces and water-courses upon the lake below."
A fit dreaming-place this for the lotus-eating monarch of a lotus-eating people. The lake is so full of the lotus and other water-lilies that more than sixty thousand tons of the edible nuts are gathered each year and ground into flour, the root besides serving as a popular esculent. What is an object of devotion with the Tibetans of the higher Himáliyas a few days' journey distant, as formerly with the Egyptians, is to the Kashmiris an article of food and trade. They might draw from the waters, which cover a very small part of the fertile valley, fish enough to support, with the nelumbium nuts, nearly the whole of the present population; but then they are lotus-eaters, and as such improvident and indolent by all rules of poetry and legend.
Srinagar has been likened to Venice. Standing a mile higher in the world, water-communication is its dependence for movement of persons and things almost as exclusively as with the Queen of the Adriatic. For once, the lean, dry Oriental has his fill of water. Moisture prevails in excess. The characteristic flat roof of his house gives place to one with slope enough to shed any shower or number of showers; and that soon becomes clad with a spontaneous growth of