Chapter I "OFF TO KASHMIR"
There are many travellers at the present time who are fortunate enough to journey to East and West. The North and South Poles even have their visitors.

The practical example of British men and women is the leaven which is gradually if slowly spreading, and this is as important, even more so, than teaching only the letter of our religion.

It is sad that the modern craze for many things, and those cheap, should debase the art of Kashmir. It is the same with the lovely old papier mache. Nowadays it is usually copied in cheap wood, in bad designs and crude colours. The old fast embroidery cottons and wools give place to cheap dyes which run at a drop of water. Unseasoned deal takes the place of fragrant old cedar wood. The silver work is often poor and brittle, so is much of the copper, and the wood-carving is rough. But efforts are being made by Mr. Hadow and others to restore the standard, and one can get good design and workmanship if one can pay for it and is willing to wait. Some of the best carving is very fine.

I should like to take you to one of the two carpet factories we once visited; it was under Mr. Hadow's supervision. Wooden sheds gave shelter to the weavers and their hand-looms. From six to ten men and boys sit in a row in front of the loom, on which is a rug in the making. A dictator sits at the end of the form, reading out the pattern at what seemed to us a rapid pace: "Three red, four blue, five white, seven blue, twelve red," and so on, in a monotonous chant, while the dictation class plies its coloured wools with deft fingers. The number of stitches to an inch in a rug of average quality is ten.

Now we are asked to go up a ladder--a very rickety one--into a wooden loft, where sits the compositor. He is a clever old man, with a long white beard and a huge turban. He salaams gravely as we trip upon the uneven boards of the floor. He knows exactly how to translate the coloured design before him into directions such as we saw down below. Another man sits on the floor taking down the orders with a reed pen on the vellum-like Kashmir-made paper.

When we compliment the old man on his skill a quiet, restrained smile crosses his face, and again he salaams; and as we climb down the ladder we hear his dignified chant: "Panch qal, tin safed, das nila. Five red, three white, ten blue," and so on.