[8] These sacred footmarks are more numerous among the Buddhists than the Moslems--the most celebrated is that on the summit of Adam's Peak, in Ceylon. Resuming his voyage from Benares, the Khan notices with wonder the apparition of the steamers plying between Calcutta and Allahabad, several of which he met on his course, and regarded with the astonishment natural in one who had never before seen a ship impelled, apparently by smoke, against wind and tide:--"I need hardly say how intensely I watched every movement of this extraordinary, and to me incomprehensible machine, which in its passage created such a vast commotion in the waters, that my poor little _budjrow_ (pinnace) felt its effects for the space of full two _hos_," (nearly four miles.) The picturesque situation of the city of Azimabad or Patna,[9] extending for several miles along the right bank of the Ganges, with the villas and beautiful gardens of the resident English interspersed among the houses, is described in terms of high admiration; and the mosques, some of which were as old as the time of the Patan emperors, are not forgotten by our Moslem traveller in his enumeration of the marvels of the city. A few days' more boating brought him to Rajmahal; "on one side of which," says he, "the country is called Bengal, and on the other _Poorb_, or the East"--a name from which the independent dynasty of Moslem kings, who once ruled in Bengal, assumed the appellation of _Poorby-Shaby_. He was now among the rice-fields, the extent and luxuriance of which surprised him: "There are a great variety of sorts, and if a man were to take a grain of each sort he might soon fill a _lota_ (water-pot) with them--so innumerable are the different kinds. The cultivators who have measured the largest species, have declared them to exceed the length of fifty cubits; but I have never seen any of this length, though others may have." He now entered the Bhagirutti, or branch of the Ganges leading to Calcutta, and which bears in the lower part of its course the better known name of the Hoogly--while the main stream to the left is again subdivided into innumerable ramifications, the greater part of which lose themselves among the vast marshes of the Sunderbunds; but he complains, that "though by this branch large vessels and steamers pass up and down to and from the Presidency, the route is very bad, from the extensive jungles on both banks, which are haunted by Thugs and _Decoits_, (river pirates:)--indeed I have heard and read, that the shores of the Ganges have been infested by freebooters, pirates, and thieves of all sorts, from time immemorial." He escaped unharmed, however, through these manifold perils; and passing Murshidabad, the ancient capital of Bengal, and other places of less note, his remarks upon which we shall not stay to quote, reached the ghauts of Calcutta in safety.