of peace; its terraced slopes splashed with the vivid green of
rice-fields, the russet and gold of ripe orchards and cornlands; up
through Srinagar, 'the City of the Sun,' of carved and gilded temples,
thronged waterways, and flat house-tops blazoned with flowers; and yet
again upward, by ways well known to him, into the hidden mysteries of
the mountains massed about the valleys; a mighty conclave of immortals
brooding in majestic meditation; shrouded at this season by dazzling
continents of cloud; and plunging green arms to the rivers and lakes,
that gleamed like molten silver under a pale sky.

To know a character rightly it should be seen in its natural element;
and the Lenox of the Himalayas was by no means the same man as the
Lenox of the Plains. All his latent energy and vigour blossomed out
like flowers at the first whisper of spring. 'The glory of Himachal'
drew and penetrated and inspired him like nothing else on earth.

Here he tracked and brought down oonyal, markhor, and the great
mountain sheep; explored on a small scale, because the fever of going
was upon him; and slept as a man only sleeps when he is living close to
the heart of Nature. Here, also,--fortified by solitude, by the
uplifting sense of things awful and divine which is the gift of great
mountains to those who love them,--he fought doggedly and
systematically against a craving that persisted in spite of improved
health. For the tyranny of opium is as tenacious as it is deadly; and
the habit of five years is not to be broken in as many weeks. But the
man who wills to conquer evil has God and Nature fighting on his side:
and in the teeth of several flagrant lapses, Lenox made steady progress.

In Srinagar he bought a bottle of chlorodyne; and two days later flung
it down the _khud_. When his store of drugged tobacco ran out, he
replaced it by a brand in which an innocuous admixture of opium just
sufficed to produce the faint fragrance that he loved. The black fits
of melancholy, which were native to his temperament, and which, in the
past five years, had threatened to dominate him permanently, evaporated
like morning fogs before the sun as the certainty grew in him that he
must prevail: and Quita, who had done most of the harm, made
unconscious reparation by letters whose consummate faith in the final
issue was stimulating as the mountain air itself.

By October he was back at Dera Ishmael Khan;--a renewed man, bronzed
and vigorous,