beautiful stream that you will have tramped beside.
Here the two vegetations mingle, and the orange groves
of Dowgago mark the transfusion of the two. Here
the maples and the violets begin, the geraniums
and the daphnes, the lobelias and the honeysuckles,
the ivies and the elder-trees— the' first outposts of
the European zone. But we have not yet lost the
creepers and hydrangeas of the south before the first
azalea-like rhododendrons bear promise of the shrub
that, towering at the 7,000-foot line to eighty feet in
height and dwindling again to three or four inches on the
pass, will remain with us till the frontier line is crossed.
Here the bamboos insinuate themselves at last, and as the
road sweeps up and up, the undergrowth rises here and
there into the magnificence of the tree fern, and every
corner betrays a fresh scene of luxuriance and grace.
Sometimes the bank opposite rises steep as a precipice
and red as an old English garden wall, veiled with overhanging
creepers and rich with green moss in every
crevice and on every ledge : elsewhere the bank breaks
away into a wide slope of tangled jungle, clothed with
small ponds of greenery where the need of the dotted
white huts has cleared, levelled and sown. Here the
first tender rice tips peep above the mud. Round the
echoing, waterworn curves of rock overhung by trees
and screw-pines, hanging on, God knows how, to the
bare face of the rock, crossing some small stream rustling
under its canopy of shade, still mounting every mile, the
track goes on, until the last bridge is crossed and the long
splendid zig-zags of the new road to Gangtok, which no
one uses, seam the hill in front. The barest novice knows
the short cuts, and with your ears cracking every twenty
minutes, you clamber up the old stony road, which
On the Rong li.
THIS IS V E R Y CH A R AC TER IST IC OF THE S C E N E R Y OF S IK K IM
V A L L E Y S . COLOURS (R E C ED IN G FROM FO REGROUN D) '
Chestnut-brown, steel-blue, granite, myrtle-green, sage-green
and lightening greys.