Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/196

182 of six thousand feet, and it flourishes from that height down to about two thousand feet, or perhaps lower. Some people are very fond of Indian tea, and declare it to be equal if not superior, to that of the Middle Kingdom; but I do not agree with them at all. When my supplies ran out in High Asia, tea was for some time my only artificial beverage, though that, too, failed me at last, and I was obliged to have recourse to roasted barley, from which really very fair coffee can be made, and coffee quite as good as the liquid to be had under that name in half the cafés of Europe. It is in such circumstances that one can really test tea, when we are so dependent on it for its refreshing and invigorating effects; and I found that none of the Indian tea which I had with me — not even that of Kangra, which is the best of all — was to be compared for a moment, either in its effects or in the pleasantness of its taste, with the tea of two small packages from Canton, which were given me by a friend just as I was starting from Simla. The latter, as compared with the Himáliyan tea, was as sparkling hock to home-brewed ale, and yet it was only a fair specimen of the ordinary better-class teas of the Pearl River.

Looking from Rajpore at the foot of the hills up to Masúri, that settlement has a very curious appearance. Many of its houses are distinctly visible along the ridges; but they are so very high up, and so immediately above one, as to suggest that we are in for something like the labours and the experience of Jack on the bean-stalk. In the bazaar at Rajpore, I was reminded of the Alps by noticing several cases of goître: and I afterwards saw instances of this disease at Masúri; at Kalka, at the foot of the Simla hills; at Simla; at Nirth, a very hot place near Rampur in the Sutlej valley; at Lippe, a cool place, above nine thousand feet high, in Upper Kunawur, with abundance of good water; at Kaelang in Lahoul, a similar place, but still higher; at the Ringdom Monastery in Zanskar, about twelve thousand feet high; in the great open valley of Kashmir; and at Pesháwar in the low-lying trans-Indus plains. These cases do not all fit into any particular theory which has been advanced regarding the cause of this hideous disease; and Dr. Bramley has mentioned in the Transactions of the Medical Society of Calcutta, that in Nepal he found goître was more prevalent on the crests of high mountains than in the valleys. The steep ride to Masúri up the vast masses of mountain, which formed only the first and comparatively insignificant spurs of the Himáliya, gave a slight foretaste of what is to be experienced among their giant central ranges.

Masúri, though striking enough, is by no means a picturesque place. It wants the magnificent deodar and other trees of the Simla ridge, and, except from the extreme end of the settlement, it has no view of the Snowy Mountains, though it affords a splendid outlook over the Dehra Doon, the Sewaliks, and the Indian plains beyond. The "Himalayan Hotel" there is the best hotel I have met with in India; and there are also a club-house and a good subscription reading-room and library. Not a few of its English inhabitants live there all the year round, in houses many of which are placed in little shelves scooped out of the precipitous sides of the mountain. The ridges on which it rests afford only about five miles of riding-paths in all, and no table-land. Its height is about seven thousand feet — almost all the houses being between six thousand four hundred and seven thousand two hundred feet above the level of the sea. But this insures a European climate; for on the southern face of the Himáliya the average yearly temperature of London is found at a height of about eight thousand feet. The chief recommendation of Masúri is its equality of temperature, both from summer to winter and from day to night; and in most other respects its disadvantages are rather glaring. In April I found the thermometer in a shaded place in the open air ranged from 60° Fahr. at daybreak, to 71° between two and three o'clock in the afternoon; and the rise and fall of the mercury were very gradual and regular indeed, though there was a good deal of rain. The coldest month is January, which has a mean temperature of about 42° 45m.; and the hottest is July, which has 67° 35m. The transition to the rainy season appears to make very little difference; but while the months of October and November are delightful, with a clear and serene sky, and an average temperature of 54°, the rainy season must be horrible, exposed as Masúri is, without an intervening rock or tree, to the full force of the Indian south-west monsoon. The Baron Carl Hügel mentions that when he was there in 1835, the rain lasted for eighty-five days, with an intermission of 