IIO

INDIA

the most notable result of the influence of British representation
 in the councils of the durbar. The character of the
Kashmiri had been moulded by bad administration into
a timid and passive endurance of degrading oppression,
and yet these people represent an intellectual nationality
probably older than any to be found in Northern India,
still holding to the land of their ancestors in spite of the
despotism of Pathan, Moghul, Sikh, and Dogra, which has
been successively imposed upon them. Of the 820,000
souls who inhabit the Kashmir valley (including 120,000
in Srinagar alone), 93 per cent. are Muhammadan, and
the rest chiefly Hindus. There is but little crime amongst
them. They are a law-abiding race, as they were under
their ancient Hindu kings, and now they enjoy at last a
certain measure of prosperity and contentment under the
new land settlement regulations.
The state of Kashmir occupies a square mounfainous
 block of territory, about 300 miles in length
by 300 in breadth at the north-western extremity of the
Himalayas, and is divided into two almost equal parts
by the Indus diagonally crossing from north-west to
south-east. ~~ Geographically the mountain area south
of the Indus only is Himalayan, and the northern
features belong to the Trans-Himalayan system—a somewhat
 arbitrary distinction which is rendered necessary
for purposes of definition. Measured by the process
of Himalayan evolution it will be remembered that the
north-western section of the entire mass is very much
more recent than the eastern, which is separated by
geological ages from the comparatively recent formations
found east of the Brahmaputra, throughout the Tibetan
plateau, and on the north-western borders of India.
Geological evidence, therefore, supports the popular view
of Himalayan geography, which places the true Himalaya
(the “ Abode of Snow,” from the Sanscrit hima, frost,” and
dlaya, “a house”) within the gigantic arms ofthe Indus and the
Brahmaputra, and regards the entire system as the southern
revétement Or buttress of the Tibetan plateau, analogous
to the Kuen Lun mountains which border that plateau