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 monster the sea. I have not had a letter from you for more than two months, and how I should I do not know, for no London ships ever come. In a day or two we ought to have the ‘overland despatch,’ and be told about you till the beginning of February.

These mountains are going to be to me all that in such a country it is possible to expect mountains to be; and their intrinsic value is increased by the dead, brown, burning plains in which they are set and the recollection of our April fates in Calcutta—punkahs, mosquitoes, rooms like dark ovens in the house, and red dust and hot, stifling air out of it. Here we have hills above, below, and around us; fires burning in every room; bracing air blowing in at the windows; snowy mountains in the distance; the great rhododendrons just getting covered with flowers; and roads and paths without end for riding, which we pursue with a kind of horrid pleasing consciousness that, if the pony takes fright at anything on one side of him, he will go down a precipice on the other. We have only been here two days, yet I see the politics of the place turns upon riding horses or ponies. The ‘horse’ party is the strongest