Between the mountains.(Letter from Kashmir)

When the French doctor Francois Bernier entered the Kashmir Valley for the first time, in 1665, he was astounded by what he found. "In truth," he wrote, it "surpasses in beauty all that my warm imagination had anticipated. It is not indeed without reason that the Moghuls call Kachemire the terrestrial paradise of the Indies." The valley, which is some ninety miles long and twenty miles across, is sumptuously fertile. Along its floor, there are walnut and almond trees, orchards of apricots and apples, vineyards, rice paddies, hemp and saffron fields. There are woods on the lower slopes of the surrounding mountains -- sycamore, oak, pine, and cedar. The southern side is bounded by the Pir Panjal, not the highest mountain range in Asia but one of the most striking, rising abruptly from the valley floor. The northern boundary is formed by the Great Himalayas. At the heart of the valley lie Dal Lake and the graceful capital, Srinagar.

For Europeans, Kashmir became a locus of romantic dreams, inspiring writers like the Irish poet Thomas Moore, who didn't even need to visit it to understand its charms. "Who has not heard of the Vale of Cashmere," he wrote in 1817, "with its roses the brightest that earth ever gave." So seductive was this landlocked valley that, like a beautiful woman surrounded by jealous lovers, Kashmir attracted a succession of invaders, each eager to possess her.

The Moghuls established their control in the sixteenth century. Kashmir became the northern limit of their Indian empire as well as their pleasure ground, a place to wait out the summer heat of the plains. They built gardens in Srinagar, along the shores of Dal Lake, with cool and elegantly proportioned terraces -- with fountains and roses and jasmine and rows of chinar trees. The Moghul rulers were followed by the Afghans and, later, by the Sikhs from the Punjab, who were driven out in the nineteenth century by the British, who then sold the valley, to the abiding shame of its residents, for seven and a half million rupees to the maharaja, Gulab Singh. Singh was the notoriously brutal Hindu ruler of Jammu, the region that lay to the south, beyond the Pir Panjal, on the edge of the plains of the Punjab.

Under Singh, the Kashmir Valley was conjoined in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. According to one calculation of the purchase, the ruler of the newly formed state had bought the people of Kashmir for approximately three rupees each, a sum he was to recover many times over through taxation. For the maharaja and his descendants and their visitors, the valley was a luxurious paradise; they enjoyed fishing and duck shooting, boating excursions on Dal Lake, picnics in the hills and the saffron fields, moonlit parties in the magnificent gardens. In the penetrating cold of the winters, the visitors, and the maharaja, left the valley to itself and returned to Jammu.

Kashmir was also a natural crossroads. The Silk Route, with its great camel trains from China, passed to the north, and the country's mountain passes opened routes to the Punjab, Afghanistan, and Jammu. Through them successive intruders brought different cultures that added layers to Kashmir's own. The Kashmiri language was a mixture of Persian, Sanskrit, and Punjabi; the handicrafts for which the valley was celebrated were Central Asian; and the religious faith was variously Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim. Sufi masters left a legacy of music and tolerance in their Muslim teachings. A Sikh who had lived many years in Srinagar described the culture of the valley as an old cloth so covered in patches that you can't see the original.

Today, the valley is predominantly Muslim, but, as part of the maharaja's portmanteau state of Jammu and Kashmir, it still shares its destiny with other faiths and peoples: the Hindus of Jammu, the Buddhists of Ladakh, as well as Gilgits and Baltis, Hunzas and Mirpuris. There had been conflicts between the communities in the past, but by the mid-twentieth century Kashmir was an unusually tolerant culture. It escaped the intercommunal violence that Partition brought to the neighboring Punjab when the British left the subcontinent, in 1947. Kashmir's violence was to occur later, as the two new states of India and Pakistan became the latest of Kashmir's neighbors to fight over it.

Today, Kashmir is partitioned -- Pakistan controls slightly less than a third, India some sixty per cent, and China the rest. Most of Kashmir's twelve million people are concentrated in Indian-held territories, and the rest are mainly in Pakistan-held ones; relations among its many communities are now marked by mutual mistrust. And since the late eighties a bewildering number of combatants have fought a savage, irregular war that, in a steady daily toll of killing, has cost, depending on whom you believe, between thirty to eighty thousand lives. On the side of the Indian state, the participants include the local police, the Border Security Force, the Central Reserve Police Force, and the Army, supported by various intelligence organizations and a motley group of turncoat former militants who have muddied the public understanding of who, over the years, has done what to whom. Opposing them are a proliferation of Islamic militant groups. At one time, there were more than sixty of them. Several are fundamentalist and deadly -- like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, which are based in Pakistan (and have been listed as terrorists by the United States) and were recently banned by Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf. The largest group, the Hizbul Mujahideen, is Muslim but not, its supporters insist, fundamentalist, and most of its activists, who number around a thousand, are Kashmiris.