Not that Savoy is the only place where criss-cross bridges are still in vogue. Much finer specimens are to be found in Kashmír, thrown across the river Jhelum, the Hydaspes of Greek historians. At Srínagar, the capital city, founded in the sixth century A.D., there is a quite wonderful example, for it has many spans, and corbelled out from the footway is a quaint little street of frail shops, rickety cabins with gabled roofs, and so unequal in size that they are charmed with an amusing inequality. I have several photographs of this bridge, and in them I see always with a renewed pleasure its ancestry, its descent from the prehistoric lake-villages, those heralds of Venice and of Old London Bridge (p. 216). All the piers are made with deodar logs piled up in the criss-cross manner; those that stretch across the river are cut in varying lengths, and each succeeding row is longer than the one beneath it, so the logs in a brace of piers project towards each other farther and farther over the water, till at last they form an arched shape; not an arch perfect in outline, of course, since the head of it is flattened by the long bearing beams of the roadway. Still, the arched shape is very noticeable. A pontist should study these rude arches with care, and connect them with similar arches in the Gaulish bridges of Savoy, and also with the historic fact that the first arches built with _voussoirs_ (i.e. arch-stones) were evolved from vaults roughly constructed with parallel courses of stone and layers of timber (p. 155). It is probable that the parallel layers of timber or rows of logs came before the parallel courses of stone, as the evolution of architecture passed from wood to stone. Forests much more than rocks and quarries have been an inspiration to primitive builders, as if the handling of wood has quickened in human nature an arboreal instinct dating from the family trees in the descent of man. [Illustration: AT ALBI ON THE TARN, IN FRANCE, SHOWING ON OUR RIGHT THE OLD HOUSES, AND ON OUR LEFT, BEYOND THE BRIDGE, THE GREAT OLD CHURCH, FAMOUS FOR ITS FORTIFICATIONS] However, another criss-cross bridge in Kashmír ought to be studied in photographs; it is carried on six piers over the Jhelum at Baramula--quite close to the Himalayas; the piers rise from boat-shaped platforms that meet the oncoming water as boats do, with their blunt stems looking brave as rearguards. The parapet is a simple latticework, and the abutments are masonry. Here we have a type of bridge perhaps quite similar to the one from which the Gauls got their rude methods, long after the craft of the lake-dwellers had left its sheltered moorings and adventured across wide rivers.