Page:The Garden of India.djvu/12

 THE

GARDEN OF INDIA,

CHAPTER I.

A BIRD S-EYE VIEW.

If the reader were gifted with telescopic powers of vision, and could take his stand at sunrise some bright morning in early April on a certain wind-swept hill-side, almost exactly 82° E. longitude and 23° N. latitude, which is very vividly present before my mind's eye at this moment, he would see before him, sloj^ing gently southward to the Ganges, the great plain of Oudh. Behind him would rise in green, tumbled masses the pine-clad hills of Naipal, shutting out the distant glories of the snowy range. At his feet, and stretching far away on either hand to east and west, he would see a broad belt of primaeval forest — the shrunken remnant of that mighty wood, the great Gandharb Ban, which once covered the country north of the Sarj u. river up to the hills — intersected by a gleaming line where the waters of the Eapti glisten brightly in the morning sunlight. Here only in Oudh may still be tasted, though in diminished measure, the indescribable charm, which no one who has once known it can ever forget, of the wild, free, irresponsible life of the forest.

Life has not many better things to offer in the way of piirely natural pleasure than it bestows on a hard-working