Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/265

, and deer of various varieties; the wild goat and wild sheep, and wild donkey, there find food and protection.

Its rivers are worthy of the mountains that give them birth; roaring, raging, impetuous, irresistible floods;dashing over precipices, and cutting through rocks; at one place breaking into streams, where one might fish for trouts; at another expanding into pools, where a whale might lodge or a navy might ride: here sweeping away the giants of the forests, root and branch, like straws upon a rivulet; there washing away whole estates in landsslips; undermining the very mountains themselves, hurling their fragments audibly along their bottom like thunder, and piling up their colossal bones in boulders, that excite wonder and astonishment; compared with whose masses the stones of our Druidical circles are but putting-stones.

The slopes of these hills are studded with neat and commodious villages, tenanted by a primitive population in easy and comfortable circumstances; its uplands are sprinkled with numerous flocks and herds, and where the surface admits of being cut into terraces, with a command of water for irrigation, fertile crops of grain are produced. The greater part of European fruits and flowers grow spontaneously: the blackberry, the raspberry, the gooseberry and the currant;the cherry, the