Srinagar, Aug. 11 -- By Shereen Naman

My name is William Carpenter.

I was a painter of watercolours, an Englishman who wandered the length of India in the middle years of the last century with little more than a box of colours, a sheaf of paper, and an eye that could not rest.

Of all the places I saw, including Bombay's crowded streets, the courts of Rajasthan, the golden temple at Amritsar, and the far reaches of Afghanistan, none entered my blood the way Kashmir did.

Three summers - 1853, 1854, and 1855 - I returned to that high valley as a man returns to a beloved face he cannot forget. After the white heat of the plains, the first sight of the mountains rising in cold, pure lines against the sky felt like a deliverance.

I neither...