Sometimes in the villages one finds the roofs of the larger houses and of the shrines {zidrafs) made of birch bark with a layer of earth above it. This forms an excellent roof, and in the spring the housetops are covered with iris, purple, white, and yellow, with the red Turk’s head and the Crown Imperial lilies. In the city nearly all the houses of well-to-do people are roofed with the birch bark and earth, so that looking down on Srinagar from the Hari-Parbat hill one sees miles of verdant roofing.
– “The Valley of Kashmir” (1895) by Walter Rooper Lawrence
Photograph: View of Srinagar city down from temple at Hari Parbat. June 2008
