The Kashmir Shawl

FOUR


When Nerys came round, it was to see a circle of Ladakhi faces peering down at her. Her head was resting in someone’s lap.

‘Tell them to step back and give her some air, for God’s sake.’

It was a relief to hear Myrtle’s voice, and then to see Archie McMinn holding back the onlookers. A bottle of smelling salts was waved under Nerys’s nose and she coughed violently. She tried to sit up and Evan’s face came into focus. He was kneeling beside her, distress in every line of his body. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘What for?’ Myrtle wanted to know. It was Myrtle’s lap Nerys was lying in, and Myrtle’s hand on her forehead.

‘Archie, make all these people go away, can’t you?’ she ordered.

There were fireworks going off somewhere close at hand, showers of crimson sparks falling out of the sky. The commissioner arrived, his face blooming even redder with embarrassed concern.

‘Mr Watkins, we’ll organise a stretcher party to carry your wife into the house.’

Nerys fought her way to a sitting position. ‘I’m all right now. Please let me get up.’



Several pairs of arms supported her, some urging her upwards and others restraining her. Nerys twisted so she could see Myrtle’s face. She looked straight into her eyes. ‘Help me,’ she begged.

Myrtle understood what was needed. She supported Nerys as she got to her feet and let her lean on her arm. ‘I think you can walk, can’t you? That’s good. Come inside the house with me.’

‘Nerys …’ Evan began.

But she didn’t have the strength to reassure him, not at this moment, or to smooth over the acute discomfort her fainting in public would have caused him. ‘I’ll be all right with Mrs McMinn.’ She tried to smile. ‘I fainted, that’s all. It’s nothing.’

‘Myrtle will take care of her, old chap,’ Archie said, in a tone that implied they shouldn’t involve themselves in women’s business.

With Nerys still leaning on Myrtle’s arm they began to walk slowly, the commissioner sailing ahead of them, like an ice-breaker cutting through the floes of the crowd. When they reached the veranda he explained that every guest bedroom in the house was occupied: would Mrs Watkins mind if he escorted them to his own quarters? He added that a runner had been sent to fetch the Leh doctor, who unfortunately happened not to be at the Residency this evening.

Myrtle put her hand on his arm. ‘Won’t you go back to your guests now, and let your bearer look after us?’

He looked thoroughly relieved at the suggestion. A moment later a servant showed the two women into a masculine bedroom with the shutters closed against the noise of the party. Nerys saw polo prints on the walls, a brass-framed bed, and a pair of highly polished tall boots with the knobs of boot trees protruding. Luckily there was a day-bed with a plaid rug folded on it, pushed back against a wall. She didn’t think she could have made herself comfortable on the commissioner’s own bed.



Myrtle shook out the rug. ‘Lie down here. Could you drink a glass of water? Or maybe some sweet tea?’

Nerys ran her tongue over dry lips. ‘You’ve been so kind. This afternoon, and now.’

Myrtle sat beside her, took her hands and massaged some warmth into them. ‘You need looking after. Is Leh quite the right place for a woman in your condition, even a missionary’s wife?’

Nerys couldn’t stop herself. She tried, drawing up her shoulders and clenching her jaw, but it was too late. The first sob caught in her chest and then exploded out of her. Tears rushed out of her eyes and poured down her face. She gasped, between sobs, ‘I’m not … I’m not expecting a … baby. I was, but I lost it.’ The words were half obliterated and she gave up the attempt to speak. It was a relief to cry. It was the first time she had wept properly since the miscarriage.

The other woman enveloped her in a hug, the warmest embrace Nerys had had for long weeks. Myrtle whispered in her ear, ‘Oh, God, how clumsy of me, how stupidly clumsy. Please forgive me. I just assumed. Was it bad? It must have been, and you haven’t properly recovered, have you? You poor, poor thing. Go on, cry all you can.’

She held on to her and stroked her hair, muttering soothing half-sentences, and Nerys went ahead and cried like a two-year-old.

At last, the sobbing slowed and stopped. Nerys lifted her head, revealing a streaming red face. The collar and yoke of Myrtle’s blouse were soaked, but Myrtle only dug in the pockets of her flannel trousers and produced a large linen handkerchief. She dried Nerys’s cheeks before putting it into her hands. ‘It’s one of Archie’s. Little lacy things are no good out here, are they? It’s camp laundered too, scented with eau de kerosene. Go on, blow.’

Nerys blew hard, and then sniffed. She realised she felt distinctly better. ‘I’ve been very feeble today, haven’t I? It’s not the impression I wanted to give, honestly. It’s not what I’m really like.’

‘Feeble, eh? Living up here, cut off all winter, the only British woman for a couple of hundred miles, single-handedly running a mission school, tra-la. Yep. I’d say that’s as weak as water.’ Myrtle was smiling as she thumbed the last tears from Nerys’s cheek. ‘Take me, by comparison. Lotus-eating half the year on the lake in Srinagar, then venturing out for a dainty hunting trip with just five servants, eleven ponies and my devoted husband. You make me feel feeble, my girl. Feeble and spoilt.’ In an automatic gesture she reached with her fingers to twist her pearl necklace.

Nerys’s stomach turned over. She realised that, as well as being covered with dust and grass stalks, her cream cardigan was hanging open. Her hands clutched the place where the brooch had been. ‘It’s gone!’ she cried.

Myrtle burrowed in the opposite trouser pocket. She held out the circlet in the palm of her hand. ‘It had come undone. You were lucky it didn’t skewer you through the heart when you fainted dead away.’

They looked at each other, and then they began to laugh. Myrtle comically scratched her hair so it stood up in a cocks-comb, and Nerys rocked back against the buttoned cushion of the day-bed. They were still laughing when the commissioner’s bearer knocked at the door. ‘Madam, doctor here.’

Dr Tsering bustled in, looking puzzled. He was the only doctor in Leh and, like the commissioner, he spent just a few weeks of the year in town. Nerys knew that he was overwhelmed with sick people clamouring for cures for all their ailments before the snow came – as if leprosy or TB could be cured with a brown bottle of pills – and she regretted that he had been summoned all the way to the Residency to attend to her trivial problem. She collected herself. ‘I am much better,’ she said.

‘Laughter very good treatment, ma’am,’ he answered. He unclipped his bag and uncoiled a stethoscope. ‘Now, lying back, please.’



Four days later Dr Tsering paid Nerys another visit, this time at the mission, and declared that she was fit to travel.

In surprise she protested, ‘But I’m not planning to travel anywhere.’

Myrtle’s company had restored her spirits. They had enjoyed their hours of what Archie McMinn called pincushion time, although the only actual sewing they did was to make simple costumes for a playlet acted by the children. Mostly they had played games with the smallest infants, and walked in the bazaar, and exchanged details of their contrasting histories. Nerys had talked about Wales, and startled herself by describing the low grey crags and mist-filled valleys with a longing she didn’t even know she had been feeling.

In turn Myrtle explained that she was the daughter of an Indian Civil Service official, and her childhood had been parcelled out between relatives in England and annual visits to India. ‘I didn’t see much of my ma and pa,’ she said succinctly.

Archie was a railway engineer, and in a few days’ time his annual long leave would be over. Myrtle and he were going back to Srinagar, and Nerys already knew how much she would miss her new friend.

Archie had been busy every day, paying off his hunting servants and pony men, making arrangements for the heads he had bagged, engaging more men for the return journey to Kashmir, and visiting the commissioner and the other Leh notables. But one morning, looking grave after returning from the Residency, he strolled from the mission veranda into the room where Evan’s predecessor’s old wireless stood. ‘It would be useful to get the BBC news,’ he murmured.

‘That wireless has never worked, I’m afraid,’ Evan explained stiffly. ‘Not in our time.’

Archie nodded, and unscrewed the back to investigate the innards. Within an hour he had established that there was nothing wrong except that the massive battery was flat. The Residency had a wireless and so did the Gomperts, so the most important news from the outside world reached them quite quickly, but for everything else the Watkinses had to wait for newspapers and letters to make their way overland. Evan agreed that it would be most useful if the mission’s wireless could be coaxed back into service. That same day, four coolies and a bullock cart ferried the weighty lead-acid battery down to the Indus, where it was hooked up to the water-powered generator. The next day, accompanied by a parade of dancing children, it made the reverse journey.

With the children still looking on, Archie went to work with pliers and a screwdriver. After a few minutes a sudden torrent of static burst out of the fretwork front panel. The startled audience screeched and fell over each other to get away from it. He twisted the knobs and the static dissolved into a babble of voices, and then the jaunty cadence of an English folk song. The children’s eyes widened with amazement.

Archie brushed his palms together. ‘There we are.’

That evening after Diskit had cleared the dinner plates, they pulled their chairs close to the dusted and polished set and listened to the news.

German troops had reached Leningrad, and the city would soon be surrounded. The European war was creeping closer. Even Leh no longer felt removed from the threat.

Evan slid a bookmark between the pages of his Bible before he closed it. ‘Nerys, I think it would be a good idea if you were to go with Mr and Mrs McMinn to Srinagar. Mr McMinn has kindly offered to escort you.’

Nerys let her knitting drop. Myrtle’s eyes met hers, and she read surprise in them. This was an idea the two men had hatched, without reference to their wives. Dr Tsering was evidently in on the plot too. To contain her anger she made herself count five stitches in her work, then asked composedly, ‘Why would I do that?’

‘You might enjoy a short holiday, and it would consolidate your strength before the winter.’

‘And what about you?’

He paused, then said, ‘We have spoken about this, my dear. I am going out of Leh to visit a few of the villages, and the more far-flung settlements. I must take the Lord to the people, not sit here expecting the people to come to the Lord.’

Out of the corner of her eye Nerys saw Archie McMinn stretch out his long legs. She resumed her steady knitting. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘we shouldn’t bore our guests with this debate. We can talk about it later.’

Myrtle said gently, ‘I would love to have your company, Nerys. If it’s helpful for you to know that.’

But later, once Evan had brought the shaft of cold air into their bed, enquired if Nerys was ready and blown out the candle, he merely said, ‘Goodnight, my dear.’

She turned her head on the pillow and glared at his dark shape. ‘Is that all?’

He drew away from her, by no more than half an inch, but she felt it. That small movement told her everything. Evan no longer saw her as his companion and supporter but as yet another source of anxiety. He would feel easier without her, and he would be freer to carry the mission work out of Leh. He didn’t want to abandon her altogether, though. To send her off to Srinagar with the McMinns must seem the perfect solution. She could follow his thinking exactly, and all she could really object to was his suggestion that what she needed in order to recover from the loss of their baby was a lakeside holiday without him.

‘All?’

‘I don’t want to go to Srinagar. Thank you for thinking of it, but I don’t want to go anywhere if it means leaving you behind.’



‘Separation is one of the penalties of the work I do, Nerys.’

He was like a wall, she thought. A blank wall that shut out the view, and endlessly denied that there was anything to be seen.

She tried another tack. ‘What about my schoolchildren?’

‘I expect they will enjoy a holiday too.’ He sighed with the beginnings of exasperation. ‘I don’t know why you are objecting to the idea. I thought you would be pleased. You like Mrs McMinn, don’t you?’

‘Yes, very much.’

‘Then go and stay with her, enjoy a rest, recuperate. I will cover the ground between here and Kargil more slowly, and investigate the work that might be done in future, if we ever have more people. Then I will come down to Srinagar to meet you, and we shall travel back to Leh together.’

‘All this, before the snow comes?’

‘It is only the beginning of September, but if the weather happens to be against us the Lord will direct our actions.’

‘Do you really want me to go?’

The mattress rustled as he minutely shifted his weight. ‘I think it would be a good idea.’

‘Very well,’ Nerys said, in a cold voice that she didn’t want to acknowledge as her own.

Three days later, her bag stood in the mission courtyard beside the McMinns’ luggage, waiting to be loaded on to the first relay of ponies. Nerys handed out apples and dried apricots to the scrum of Leh children, not just her pupils, who were staring through the gate at all the activity. Diskit’s three grimy offspring were among them, and Diskit herself stood on the house steps in tears. She wasn’t wearing her headcloth. Nerys put down the fruit basket and went to her. ‘Don’t cry. I’ll be back in two months’ time. Sahib will bring me home.’

Diskit only sobbed more loudly. Nerys put her arm round her shoulders, inhaling the ripe smell of her hair. ‘Don’t forget your scarf. Always when you are working. Look after Sahib for me.’



Diskit wiped her nose on her sleeve and sniffed. ‘Yes, Mem.’

‘The ponies are ready,’ Archie announced, from beyond the gate, as hoofs rattled on the dried earth. Myrtle had put on her sola topi, with the muslin veil tied around her face, and Nerys had a wide straw hat.

Evan stood to one side, looking unhappy now the moment of parting had finally come. Nerys went to his side and reached up for a kiss. Awkwardly he knocked her hat askew as their dry lips touched. He stood back at once and patted her shoulder. ‘It won’t be so long. God bless you, my dear.’

She mumbled a goodbye, conscious that Diskit, the house-boys and the schoolchildren were watching, although the McMinns had tactfully busied themselves out in the street. The bolder children flung themselves at her, clasping her knees, and she bent down to hug and kiss each of them, instead of her husband.

Archie and Myrtle were mounted and Nerys’s pony was waiting. Archie’s bearer helped her to clamber into the padded saddle, then took the reins and turned the pony’s head to the road for her. She twisted round to wave goodbye. The procession moved off down the lane, past the chapel and into the street leading to the bazaar, leaving Evan’s solitary black silhouette outlined against the stone wall of the mission compound.

It was a cloudless day. As they wound the first miles along the Indus valley, Nerys felt heat strike through her straw hat, and wished she had brought cotton gloves to protect her hands from the blazing sun. After a time, on a high spur of land, she saw the prayer flags and brass spires of Spitok rising above the towering walls. This was the first of the great gompas on the route, and it was the furthest point she had travelled from Leh in more than a year.

Myrtle had gone ahead, but now she reined in her pony and waited for Nerys to catch up. Archie and the string of pack ponies were already far in the distance, enveloped in a puff of swirling dust.



‘Would you like company?’ Myrtle asked. Only her dark eyes were visible between the swathes of veil. ‘Or would you rather be left to yourself?’

Nerys looked up at the mountains ahead. The surprising strength that she had discovered on the long ride up from Manali seemed within her grasp again. ‘Company, please,’ she said.

Myrtle reached out of the saddle to pat her knee. ‘Good.’

They faced west, and rode on.



Nerys soon discovered that travelling with the McMinns was a completely different experience from her journey with Evan. At night they stayed in the rest houses set along the route, commandeering the places regardless of who might have arrived ahead of them. As a British sahib and a proper daughter of the Raj, Archie and Myrtle automatically took the precedence they saw as their due. They felt no compunction in ousting Ladakhi or Kashmiri travellers from the shelters, even on one evening a Muslim man, with a hennaed beard, who was accompanied by several veiled wives and half a dozen small children and babies. Evan and Nerys had always been confused and unwilling to impose themselves over other people, even the humblest. Whenever they came to a guesthouse, to sleep beside the road in their draughty tent had often seemed the easier solution.

The rest houses were often no more than two-roomed shacks, a living and sleeping room and an attached kitchen, and they were generally dirty and lacking any but the most basic amenities, but Sahib McMinn and his party were always greeted by the owners with extra civility and efforts to please. It wasn’t hard to deduce why, because although Archie demanded a full account of what was owing and didn’t overpay by a single anna, he invariably understood what the fair rate should be and handed over the money promptly and cheerfully.

Their camp servants always first arrived at the rest house, and by the time the McMinns rode up, their yakdan bags had been untied from the ponies and set in the room for them. Camp beds were erected because Myrtle refused to use the charpoys provided, saying they were alive with bugs. Archie always pretended to be dismayed by his wife’s fussy behaviour, but affectionate amusement twinkled out of him. There were plenty of warm blankets, and even linen sheets, which were unpacked and repacked each day. The McMinns’ servants bought food locally to supplement the supplies the pack ponies carried, and their cook made the dinners, which were served with plates and cutlery rinsed daily in a solution of potassium permanganate. Sometimes there was even the opportunity to take a bath. A collapsible canvas structure was erected and part-filled, and Nerys was able to sit in it and luxuriously scoop warm water from an enamel jug over her skin and hair.

At the end of each day’s journey, sitting in their camp chairs under the cobwebby guesthouse rafters, there was plenty for the three to talk and laugh about. Myrtle gossiped and joked about people they had encountered, or the various foibles of the pony men.

‘Do you think they have a rota?’ she speculated, about the Muhammadan and his wives.

‘No, I should think he favours the prettiest one,’ Archie replied. ‘I would.’

‘How can he tell?’ Myrtle wondered.

‘They don’t go to bed in their veils, darling.’

Myrtle hooted with laughter. She smoked thin black cigarettes with opulent gold tips. The first time she lit one, Nerys glanced at her in surprise and Myrtle blew out a long plume of smoke. ‘I was on my very best behaviour, you know, when we met. We were staying in the mission house. Will you disapprove hugely when you really get to know me?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Nerys laughed.

Last thing at night, the bearer brought in mugs of hot cocoa. Archie tipped a slug of brandy into his own and Myrtle’s, and raised an eyebrow at Nerys.



‘Yes, please,’ she said. This was a custom to which she had quickly adapted.

There was only ever the one room at the rest houses, but she soon also got used to sharing with Myrtle and Archie. In bed Myrtle wore pearl-grey silk pyjamas with a Parisian label. ‘Much better for travelling, you know. The coolies drop lice in the beds when they make them up, but they slither off the silk.’

She was right. Lice had been a feature of the Watkinses’ journey up to Leh, clinging snugly in the seams of Nerys’s flannel nightgowns.

With Archie’s rhythmic snoring and Myrtle’s breathing as its accompaniment, Nerys found that she slept better on the Srinagar road than she had done lately in the mission house. Every morning, as soon as it was light, the bearer brought in their bed tea. After they had drunk it Archie went outside in his dressing-gown to shave in daylight while the women got dressed, and then it was time for hot porridge, scrambled eggs and the cook’s delicious fresh bread.

They walked or rode all day, through tiny villages with narrow fields of ripe grain winding beside the rutted track, where bedraggled hens pecked at the verges and stray sheep went scudding ahead of the ponies. Banks of tattered rose bushes spread on either side, now hung with orange hips, like jewels sewn on devoré velvet. When the track rose out of the sparse villages, the immense land was rocky and barren. The mountains loomed over them again, shadowed in sepia and purple, the most commanding ridge sometimes crowned with the massive white walls of a gompa.

At Lamayuru, a few miles before the Fotu Pass, which was the highest point they would have to cross on the route, they stopped for the night in the shadow of the biggest monastery. It was a lowering, piled-up mass of white walls and red-painted wooden slabs, small-windowed, topped off with the squat domes of a dozen chortens with black and gold twisted spires that glittered like spun sugar. The ponies toiled up hundreds of irregular steps to reach the cluster of buildings clinging to the skirts of the monastery. Prayer flags danced against the blue sky overhead and Nerys was reminded of Spitok gompa, past which they had climbed on the road out of Leh. With a prickle of guilt, she realised she had been so busy with the small adventures of the road, and laughing about them with Myrtle and Archie, that Evan had hardly been in her mind. At this distance he seemed a dark, disapproving figure, in contrast to the light-filled days she had been enjoying.

At Lamayuru they were staying in the inevitable rest house, but this one was much bigger than the roadside versions because of the stream of visitors to the monastery. Nerys was shown to a room of her own, no more than a tiny stone slot with a single narrow window. It looked out over a huge drop, with black choughs gliding below the sill.

Their dinner that night was unusually subdued, as if the proximity of the monastery and the columns of red-robed monks quietened even Myrtle.

Afterwards, instead of going back to her cell Nerys went outside and, on an impulse, climbed more steps to the walls of the monastery itself. She tipped back her head to look at the great edifice towering above her, black against the curtain of stars. Patches of faint yellow light glowed like veiled eyes in a few of the windows and she shivered in the wind. She thought she could hear the rise and fall of voices, chanting a prayer. Archie had murmured over dinner that Lamayuru village was a bleak place to live because the tributes and food demanded by the lama to sustain the monks left too little for the villagers themselves. It certainly seemed a desolate place tonight, as she pressed deeper into the angle made by a stone wall to find a scrap of shelter. From somewhere among the tiers of ramshackle houses beneath her rose the sound of a dog howling. She tried to imagine what Evan could achieve in a place like this, offering the promises and threats of a different religion to people who would be better off providing for their families and keeping their rice and mutton for themselves.



All she felt towards her husband was an exasperated tenderness, and she wondered whether this diminished affection, against her own belief that what he did was futile, would be anything like enough to carry her through the years ahead. I could do it, she thought, and anything else he wanted of me, if we had our own children.

She was thoroughly cold now. The monastery loomed so high and dark it was as if it was going to topple over and crush her. She pulled her coat closer around her shoulders and made her way back down the steps. Archie’s bearer was waiting at the door of the dingy rest house.

‘Come now, ma’am,’ he called, and she felt guilty that she had kept him in the draught when he could have been reclining on his blanket with a pipe.

‘I’m sorry, Hari.’

He lifted the oil lamp and led the way up the wooden stairs, past curtained doorways to her cubicle. He lit the candle that had been left for her on a little shelf and stood back. ‘I bring cocoa, ma’am. Coming now.’

‘I won’t have cocoa tonight, Hari, thank you. I’ll go straight to bed.’ She wanted to close her eyes, and for daylight to come quickly. Lamayuru was an oppressive place.

After she had blown out the candle she lay listening to the darkness. There was a series of scraping sounds, probably made by rats in the ceiling. Wind gusted through the cracks between the wall and the tiny window frame. Then she heard another noise. It was no more than a woman’s voice giving a low cry, something between a moan and a sigh, followed by a series of rising gasps. And then, as a postscript, a conjoined bubble of laughter followed by a whispered ssssh.

Nerys twisted under her blankets and pulled the crackling pillow hard over her ears. She didn’t want to have to listen to Myrtle and Archie making love; there seemed too many things tonight that she didn’t want to hear or know or think about. Her own life seemed small, solitary and devoid of purpose.

The next day their route led onwards, over the high pass and through the town of Kargil. With Lamayuru a long way behind them, the travellers were in high spirits. More long but ultimately satisfying days passed, until only the jagged walls of the Greater Himalaya lay between them and the Vale of Kashmir. With the mountains in the distance it seemed impossible that their caravan could find a way to the summit via the Zoji Pass, but as they came closer they were able to pick out the crooked filament of a track zigzagging upwards. In one place there was a dart of brilliance as a mirror ornament or a fragment of polished metal on an ascending pony flashed the rays of the rising sun. Myrtle was reassuring when Nerys reined in her mount to assess the extent of the climb.

‘It looks harder than it actually is. Remember, you’ve already climbed higher than eleven thousand over the Fotu La, and on your way up to Leh last year.’

‘I’m not worried. I know we’ll do it. I’m just wondering what the view will be like from the top.’

Myrtle’s eyes shone between the folds of her veil. ‘Like nothing you could imagine. It will be like looking down into Paradise.’

This thought sustained Nerys through the long, baking ascent. Dust clogged her nose and throat and her water-bottle was soon empty. The sun rose higher, beating down on her head and shoulders. While she rode, her pony walked more and more slowly and she felt its shudders when the pony boy whipped its quarters. When she slid to the ground the stones dug up through the soles of her boots and the sun blazed fiercely. The jingle of the ponies’ harness set up a rhythm that was only broken by the occasional whistling of marmots from their burrows among the rocks. Black lammergeiers cruised the empty air spaces, lazily turning on their fretted wings.

The pass itself was obscured by intermediate outcrops, and Nerys thought grimly that they would be climbing for ever. Archie was far ahead but Myrtle matched her pace to Nerys’s. They exchanged occasional words of encouragement, but most of their energy was taken up with just placing one foot in front of the other.

As they mounted higher, Nerys began counting the number of bends still to be negotiated. There were seven, then five, then only one more.

‘Is this it?’ she begged Myrtle, dreading a false summit and a concealed cliff still to be negotiated.

Whenever she glanced backwards the wide brown desert of Ladakh had receded further, and she knew that they were crossing into a different country.

‘Nearly,’ Myrtle puffed. ‘Why must Archie dash ahead all the time?’

They came out on to a broad stretch of ground with chortens outlined ahead against the sky. Archie and the forward party were waiting for them. Down the slope Nerys glimpsed the picked-over bones and hide of a dead pony that must have fallen from the line of a caravan. It was a still day, but the air surged around her and she retied the strings of her straw hat.

They crossed the saddle of the pass, thankful for the almost horizontal ground, until they drew level with the chortens. The rough stone mounds were strung with hundreds of flags, faded or still bright, with ragged white streamers festooned between them.

Myrtle and Archie stood with their hands linked, silently looking west. Nerys came up beside them, and stopped short. Spread beneath her feet, unrolled like the most magical of carpets, was the Vale of Kashmir.

The folds of land swept up towards them, lower ridges cloaked with ranks of sombre fir trees and the higher ones bright with silver birches. Long seams of snow lay in the shaded gullies, and waterfalls laced silver threads down purple rock faces. A haze of warmth blurred the great hollow of the Vale, but she could see distant pasture lands, ripe fields, and the curves of a river. After the bare grey and brown landscape she had just crossed, the soft blend of a thousand shades of blue and silver and lavender mingled with pale green and gold seemed too sumptuous to be real. She stared at it for a long time, with the scent of rich earth and sweet water drifting up to her.

Myrtle had not been exaggerating.

It was the most beautiful place Nerys had ever seen.