More than a year and a half had been spent in the hottest parts of the
plains of India, and another dreaded hot season was rapidly making its
approach, when, together with a brother officer, I applied for and
obtained six months' leave of absence for the purpose of travelling
in Cashmere and the Himalayas, otherwise called by Anglo-Indians
"The Hills."
We had been long enough in the country to have discovered that the
gorgeous East of our imagination, as shadowed forth in the delectable
pages of the "Arabian Nights," had little or no connexion with the
East of our experience -- the dry and dusty East called India, as it
appeared, wasted and dilapidated, in its first convalescence from the
fever into which it had been thrown by the Mutiny of 1857 -- 58. We
were not long, therefore, in making our arrangements for escaping from
Allahabad, with the prospect before us of exchanging the discomforts
of another hot season in the plains, for the pleasures of a sojourn in
the far-famed valley of Cashmere, and a tramp through the mountains of
the Himalayas -- the mountains, whose very name breathes of comfort and
consolation to the parched up dweller in the plains.
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