Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/193

Rh year they have been detained in Calcutta by the Bengal famine. But Masúri is more easy of access; that place, or rather the closely adjacent military station of Landaur (Landour), commands a finer view of snowy peaks; and it is not necessary to descend from Masúri to the burning plains in order to reach Simla, as a good bridle-road, passing through the new military station of Chakraota, connects the two places, and can be traversed in fourteen easy marches, which afford very good preliminary experience for a tour in the Himáliya. In April of last year Masúri was the first elevation I made for, and eagerly did I seek its cool breezes after the intense beat of Agra and Delhi. Anglo-Indians are very hospitable towards English travellers; and as the thoughtful kindness of Sir William Muir, the then lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces, had furnished me with some valuable letters of introduction, I could not but accede to his wish that I should go to Rúrki (Roorkee) and see the engineering college there, the workshops, and the works of the Ganges Canal. At Saharunpore, the railway-station for Rúrki, there is a botanical garden, and a valuable collection of fossils, under the charge, and created by the labours, of Dr. Jamieson, of the Forest Department, a relative and pupil of the well-known mineralogist, and one of the founders of the science of geology, who for fifty years occupied the post of professor of natural history in the University of Edinburgh. Of Rurki itself, and its invaluable canal, which has done so much to prevent famine in the North-West Provinces, I hope to speak elsewhere. I was fortunate enough there to be the guest of Major Lang, the very able principal of the engineering college, who had formerly been engaged in the construction of the great Hindústhan and Tibet Road, which runs from Simla towards Chinese Tartary; and any doubts as to where I was bound for were soon entirely dissipated by the principals descriptions of Chini and Pangay, the Indian Kailas, and the Parang La. He warned me, indeed, not to attempt Chinese Tibet, lest the fate of the unfortunate Adolph Schlagintweit might befall me, and a paragraph should appear in the Indian papers announcing that a native traveller from Gartok had observed a head adorning the pole of a Tartars tent, which head, there was only too much reason to fear from his description of it, must have been that of the enterprising traveller who lately penetrated into Chinese Tibet by way of Shipki. But then it was not necessary to cross the border in order to see Chini and the Kailas; and even his children kindled with enthusiastic delight as they cried out Pangay! Pangay!

As the greatest mela or religious fair of the Hindus was being held at this time at Hardwar (Hurdwar), where the Ganges is supposed to issue from the Himáliya, I went over there to see that extraordinary scene, and was fortunate enough to hit upon the auspicious day for bathing. That also I must leave undescribed at present, and proceed in a dooly from Hardwar along a jungle-path through the Terai to the Dehra Doon and Masúri. This was my first experience of the Himáliya. In vain had I strained my eyes to catch a glimpse of their snowy summits through the golden haze which filled the hot air. Though visible from Rúrki and many other places in the plains at certain seasons, they are not so in April; but here, at least, was the outermost circle of them the Terai, or, literally, the "wet land", the "belt of death", the thick jungle swarming with wild beasts, which runs along their southern base. It is not quite so thick or so deadly here between the Ganges and the Jumna, as it is farther to the east, on the other side of the former river, and all the way from the Ganges to the Brahmapútra, constituting, I suppose, the longest as well as the deadliest strip of jungle-forest in the world. The greater cold in winter in this north-western portion, and its greater distance from the main range, prevent its trees attaining quite such proportions as they do farther east; but still it has sufficient heat and moisture, and sufficiently little circulation of air, to make it even here a suffocating hothouse, into which the wind does not penetrate to dissipate the moisture transpired by the vegetation; and where, besides the most gigantic Indian trees and plants as the sissoo, the saul-tree, with its shining leaves and thick clusters of flowers, and the most extraordinary interlacing of enormous creepers we have, strange to say, a number of trees and other plants properly belonging to far-distant and intensely tropical parts of the earth, such as the Cassia elata of Burmah, the Marlea begoniæfolia of Java, the Duringia celosiocides of Papua, and the Nerium odorum of Africa. This natural conservatory is a special haunt for wild animals, and for enormous snakes such as the 