feature; the whole division, Infantry, Cavalry, and guns, pressed close together; nothing visible from above but caps, helmets, turbans, and twinkling bayonets. Such colour, such variety, and in the pale and swarthy faces such a range of character. Reviews are often boring and always too long; but this was neither.

A long avenue of trees that would have seemed fine in any English park led up the centre of the Commander-in-Chief's camp near Pindi, close to which the review was held. A red road had been laid up the avenue, and another at right angles across the top of it, and about this were tiled beds, acres there must have been of them, green with mustard and cress; since there had been no time to grow grass or barley; and beyond the green gardens, each with a path that led to it, tents with four rooms and passages and mahogany furniture and a dozen doors. There was a round place laid out with palms and brass guns before the Royal shamiana, and another in the centre of the long avenue, which was lit at night by violet arc lamps hung from the branches, an engine supplying electricity to the camp. For months the camp must have been preparing; for two days it was occupied; in a few more the tents had vanished, and the paths and palms and the green gardens; there was nothing left but the dusty waste out of which it had sprung.

H

CHAPTER XI

THE SHRINE OF THE SIKHS

We have ended, happily, the most breathless part of our journey, only two days in the last twelve being entirely exempt from travel. Very appropriately do we spend our days in tents, though the camps in which they are pitched have an air of permanence which our hurried marches can only envy. At Jamu, which saw us arrive one morning and leave the next night, a clear stream of water had been led by miles of aqueduct into the camp. A triple arch in white and gold which had been months in building, and was the first tasteful felicitation we had seen, marked its entrance, and gardens with blossoming roses and chrysanthemums, round which the water wandered, had been laid out beside wide roadways in the almost too ample space which the camp enclosed. It was, indeed, close on half a mile from the outermost tent to the wonderful room in which we left our mountain appetites. Built there only for our brief stay, it would have dined with ease five hundred people, its lofty walls were hung with gay embroideries, its ceiling clothed, as its floor was covered, by a dozen costly Kashmir carpets,

and the approach to it was through the Royal shamiana; made of the rarest work some sixty years ago, and now priceless and unobtainable.

The painting of a butterfly seemed a less ephemeral extravagance than this lavish outlay for a single night, in which there was one amusing and typically eastern touch.

The gardener charged with sowing the lawn with grass had decamped with the money paid him for the purpose, and at the last minute the grass had to be brought down from the hills. and planted, over perhaps a dozen acres, every root by hand. It did not look happy, but grass it was, moderately green and apparently growing, a thing which grass in India very seldom is. But what a triumph of illimitable and inimitable labour !

We were not at Jamu for the mountain air or the view of the town straggling out of the dry river-bed towards the great hills-so curiously like, in its browns and yellows, many a little Italian city under the Apennines but because the State of Jamu and Kashmir is one of the most important of our feudatories, and maintains a larger body of Imperial troops than any Native State in India. Its Mountain Batteries, the only Imperial Service Artillery in the country, were engaged in the Hunza Nagar, Chitral, Punjab Frontier, and Tirah campaigns; and to its Kashmir Brigade of Infantry, the only Imperial Service