The beautiful and luxuriant Valley of Kashmir, with its superb climate and sceneries of gorgeous splendour and with its measureless appeal, has always a ring of charm about it, which defies any but a fairy pen to describe. Verily a dram of loveliness it is-nay. “if there be an Elysium on earth, it is this, it is this,†as goes a well-known Persian saying rendered into English by Thomas Moore in his Lalla Rookh. This Happy Valley is situated in the north of the Pir Panjal range of the Himalayas, by whose lofty and majestic mountains, shimmering with silvery snow, it is engirdled into an irregular oval shape-as if a picture set in a frame. It is about 84 miles long and 30 miles broad, and its area is about 4,500 square miles. In latitude it corresponds with Peshawar, Baghdad and Damascus in Asia; with Fez in Marocco in Africa; and with South Carolina in North America. Kashmir had many great and powerful rulers, whose sway, at one time, extended over the whole of India-even beyond Adam’s Bridge in the extreme south. Ancient monuments of very great archaeological interest, which disclose the existence of a lost civilization, are, as stated above, numerous in Kashmir. The devotion of kings, the revenues of the kingdom and the skill of master-artists, combined to raise the magnificent and beautiful edifices. They were built to endure for all time. Their solidity of construction and their gigantic size strike one with wonder that man, puny man, could have built them. Kings have come and gone, and civilizations have bloomed and vanished since they were built. People go and pace around them and gaze on them with amazement and awe-amazement inspired by the stupendous might and skill of their builders, and awe excited by the ruins of these edifices which look as if weeping over the departed glory of their founders.
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