The guide-book and the locomotive have marked this romantic land for their own, but their progress is far from complete. The advance of the latter, indeed, has probably reached its limit, some twenty leagues outside the extreme south-western corner. The former is still fain to depend largely on Bernier, the Frenchman who visited Kashmir two centuries ago in the train of the Mogul emperor Aurengzebe. Bernier kept his eyes open, and left not only a good account of the manners and life of the Great Mogul and his court, but a fair itinerary. His description of Srinagar and its vicinity still holds good, and modern books point us to the pass of the Pir Panjal so disastrous to the imperial ladies. The foremost of fifteen elephants, each carrying four women, took fright in a narrow part of the so-called road and backed the rest over a precipice. Only three or four of the odalisques were killed by the fall, but not one elephant was saved. Bernier passed the scene of the accident two days after, and saw some of the animals still alive, but able only to trumpet mournfully for assistance. North of Jummoo the highest type of road accommodates no longer an elephant, but at most a hill-pony. In the vale of Srinagar the chief thoroughfares are sluggish rivers, lakes and canals, navigated by a remarkably sturdy race of boatmen. The chief line of traffic to that valley, the heart of Kashmir proper, from Jummoo, is hardly practicable for horses. In its length of a hundred and seventy-seven miles it crosses two ridges, each nine thousand feet above the sea, with a hollow between five thousand feet deep. The starting-point, or southern end of the path, is fifteen hundred feet above tide, and the valley of Srinagar from fifty-two hundred to sixty-five hundred. These are all trifling elevations compared to those of the Himaliya on the south-east and the Karakoram chain, to which England has pushed the maharajah's boundary, on the north; but they will do very well for Western tourists to "cut their teeth on," especially as they are interspersed with minor hills of every grade of height and surface. The varied assortment of climates also supports the idea of a general training-ground for travellers. Bernier thought the first summit he crossed, coming from the south, "the dreadful rim of the world," but the descent of it plumped him, "as if by enchantment, into the centre of France." In sheltered places with a southern exposure the tropics reappear, but the vegetation of the foothills and middle mountains is said to be, but for the deodara cedar (_Pinus excelsa_) and a few other trees, European in character. The resemblance of the undergrowth is less marked, and still less that of the inhabitants, the costume of the mountaineers, notably the tribe named Gaddis, reasserting Asia. These Oriental Swiss are as hardy as their Western analogues, thanks to a continual struggle for existence against Nature and a tolerably frequent one against man. Against the