1 SIRINAGUR. 239
2 and that two hundred master-builders were employed on it. Of
3 this great undertaking nothing remains but a handsome mosque,
4 the rest has been reduced to a vast extent of shapeless ruins, at
5 present totally uninbabited. Moorcroft) draws a very repulsive $i. 118.
6 picture of the city of Sirinagur. ‘‘The general character of the
7 city of Kashmir is that of a confused mass of ill-favoured buildings,
8 forming a complicated labyrinth of narrow and dirty Ianes,
9 scarcely broad enough for a single cart to pass, badly paved, and
10 having a small gutter in the centre, full of filth, banked upon
11 each side by a border of mire. The houses are in general two or
12 three stories high; they are built of unburnt bricks and timber,
13 the former serving for little else than to fill up the interstices of the
14 latter. They are not plastered, are badly constructed, and are
15 mostly in a neglected and ruinous condition, with broken doors
16 or no doors at all, with shattered lattices, windows stopped up
17 with boards, paper, or rags, walls out of the perpendicular, and
18 pitched roofs threatening to fall. The roofs are formed of layers
19 of birch-bark covered by a coating of earth, in which seeds,
20 dropped by birds or wafted by the wind, have vegetated, and they
21 are constantly overrun with grass, flowers, and seeds. The
22 houses of the better class are commonly detached and surrounded
23 by a wall and gardens, the latter of which often communicate
24 with a canal. The condition of the gardens is no better than that
25 of the building, and the whole presents a striking picture of
26 wretchedness and decay.”
27 The public buildings of this city are not in much better style
28 than the private dwellings. The oldest structure is the tomb of
29 the mother of a Kashmirian king, wha reigned in the middle of
30 the fifteenth century. It is built, in an octagonal form, of brick,
31 the walls being seven or eight feet thick, aiid surmounted by a
32 dome constructed with great strength and solidity, but altogether
33 devoid of architectural beauty. The Jama Musjid, or ‘ great
34 mosque,” is the most celebrated building of the city, and native
35 estimate, which is probably exaggerated, represents it capable of
36 containing sixty thousand persons. The foundation and lower
37 part of the walls are built of stone, the upper of brick. The
38 whole is surmounted by a dome and spire rudely constructed of
39 timber, and partly supported on pillars of the same materials, and
40 of these there are three hundred and eighty-four.6* Every pillar is a © afoorer. ii. 120.
41 * There is a most extraordinary and unaccountable variance between this