We spent two days at Pundua, waiting for our
great boats (which drew several feet of water), and
botanizing in the vicinity. The old bungalow, without
wmdows and with the roof falling in, was a most
miserable shelter; and whichever way we turned from
the door, a river or a swamp lay before us. Birds,
mosquitos, leeches, and large wasps swarmed, also rats
and sandflies. A more pestilential hole cannot be
conceived; and yet people traverse this district, and
sleep here at all seasons of the year with impunity.
We did so ourselves in the month of June, when the
Sikkim and all other Terais are deadly; we returned
in September, traversing the Jheels and nullahs at the
very foot of the hills during a short break of fine
weather in the middle of the rains; and we again
slept here in November,* always exposed in the heat
of the day to wet and fatigue, and never having
even a soupgon of fever, ague, or rheumatism. This
immunity does not, however, extend to the very foot of
the hills, as it is considered imprudent to sleep at
this season in the bungalow of Terrya, only three
miles off, at the very foot of the first rise of the
mountains.
The sub-tropical scenery of the lower and outer
Sikkim Himalaya, though on a much more gigantic
At the north foot of the Khasia, in the heavily-timbered dry Terai
stretching for sixty miles to the Burrampooter, it is almost inevitable
death for a Enropean to sleep, any time between the end of April and of
November. Many have crossed that tract, but not one without taking
fever : Mr. H. Inglis was the only survivor of a party of five, and he was
ill from the effects for upwards of two years, after having been brought to
death’s door by the first attack, which came on within three weeks of his
arrival at Churra, and by several relapses.
scale, is not comparable in beauty and luxuriance with
the really tropical vegetation induced by the hot,
damp, and insular climate of these perennially humid
mountains. At the Himalaya forests of gigantic trees,
many of them deciduous, appear from a distance as
masses of dark grey foliage, clothing mountains
10,000 feet h ig h : here the individual trees are smaller,
more varied in kind, of a brilliant green, and contrast
with grey limestone and red sandstone rocks and silvery
cataracts. Palms are more numerous here, upwards
of twenty kinds being indigenous; the cultivated betel-
nut especially, raises its graceful stem and feathery
crown, “ like an arrow shot down from heaven,” in
luxuriance and beauty above the verdant slopes. This
difference is at once expressed to the Indian botanist
by defining the Khasia flora as of Malayan character;
by which is meant the prevalence of brilliant glossyleaved
evergreen tribes of trees. Figs abound in the
hot gulleys, where the property of their roots, which
inosculate and form natural grafts, is taken advantage
of in bridging streams, and in constructing what are
called living bridges, of the most picturesque forms*
Oaks, oranges, gamboge, Diospyros, figs, Jacks, plantains,
and screw-pines are more frequent here, together
with vines and peppers, and above all, palms, both
climbing ones with pinnated shining leaves, and erect
ones with similar foliage (as cultivated cocoa-nut, and
Areca), the broader-leaved wild betel-nut, and beautiful
Caryota or wine-palm, whose immense leaves are twelve
feet long. Laurels and wild nutmegs are frequent in
* See Frontispiece.