there, and all vegetation was very backward, and wore
a wintry garb. The laurels, maples, and deciduous-
leaved oaks, hydrangea and cherry, were leafless, hut
the abundance of chesnuts and evergreen oaks,
rhododendrons, Aucuba, and other shrubs, kept the
forest well clothed. The oaks had borne a very
unusual number of acorns during the last season,
which were now falling, and strewing the road in some
places so abundantly, that it was hardly safe to ride
down hill.
The plains of Bengal were all hut obscured by a
dense haze, partly owing to a peculiar state of the
atmosphere that prevails in the dry months, and
partly to the fires raging in the Terai forest, from
which white wreaths of smoke ascended, stretching
obliquely for miles to the eastward, and filling the air
with black particles of grass-stems, carried 4000 feet
aloft by the heated ascending currents that impinge
against the flanks of the mountains.
The evening was sultry and close, the heated surface
of the earth seemed to load the atmosphere with
warm vapours, and the sensation, as compared with
the cool pure air of Dorjiling, was that of entering a
confined tropical harbour after a long Sea-voyage;;
and the forest, which had looked so gigantic on my
arrival the previous year, now appeared small after the
far more lofty and bulky oaks and pines of the upper
regions.
I slept in the little bungalow of Punkabaree, and
was awakened next morning by sounds to which I had
long been a stranger, the voices of innumerable birds,
and the humming of great bees that bore large holes
for their dwellings in the beams and rafters of houses :
never before had I been so forcibly struck with the
absence of animal life in the regions of the upper
Himalaya.
Breakfasting early, I pursued my way in the so-
called cool of the morning, but this was neither bright
nor fresh ; the earth was dusty and parched; while the
sun rose through a murky yellowish atmosphere with
ill-defined orb. Thick clouds of smoke pressed upon
the plains, and the faint easterly wind wafted large
flakes of grass charcoal sluggishly along. Coarse,
ill-favoured vultures wheeled through the air, languid
Bengalees replaced the active mountaineers, jackal-like
curs teemed at every village, and ran howling away
from the onslaught of my Alpine dog; and the tropics,
with all their beauty of flower and genial warmth,
looked as forbidding and unwholesome as they felt
oppressive to a frame that had so long breathed the
fresh mountain air.
Mounted on a stout pony, I enjoyed my scamper of
sixteen miles over the wooded plains and undulating
gravelly slopes of the Terai, intervening between the
foot of the mountains and Siligoree bungalow. In the
afternoon I rode on leisurely to Titalya, sixteen miles
further, along the banks of the Mahanuddee. The
atmosphere was so hazy, that objects a few miles off
were invisible, and the sun quite concealed, though its
light was so powerful that no part of the sky could be
steadily gazed upon. During the afternoon the wind
blew with violence, but being hot and dry, brought no