Himalayan Journals — Complete: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
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Himalayan Journals — Complete: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains
Lord Cornwallis’ mausoleum is a handsome building, modelled by Flaxman
after the Sybil’s Temple. The allegorical designs of Hindoos and
sorrowing soldiers with reversed arms, which decorate two sides of the
enclosed tomb, though perhaps as good as can be, are under any
treatment unclassical and uncouth. The simple laurel and oak-leaf
chaplets on the alternating faces are far more suitable and suggestive.
_March 21._—I left Ghazepore and dropped down the Ganges; the general
features of which are soon described. A strong current four or five
miles broad, of muddy water, flows between a precipitous bank of
alluvium or sand on one side, and a flat shelving one of sand or more
rarely mud, on the other. Sand-banks are frequent in the river,
especially where the great affluents debouche; and there generally are
formed vast expanses of sand, small “Saharas,” studded with stalking
pillars of sand, raised seventy or eighty feet high by gusts of wind,
erect, stately, grave-looking columns, all shaft, with neither basement
nor capital, the genii of the “Arabian Nights.” The river is always
dotted with boats of all shapes, mine being perhaps of the most common
description; the great square, Yankee-like steamers, towing their
accommodation-boats (as the passengers’ floating hotels are called),
are the rarest. Trees are few on the banks, except near villages, and
there is hardly a palm to be seen above Patna. Towns are unfrequent,
such as there are being mere collections of huts, with the ghat and
boats at the bottom of the bank; and at a respectful distance from the
bazaar, stand the neat bungalows of the European residents, with their
smiling gardens, hedgings and fencings, and loitering servants at the
door. A rotting charpoy (or bedstead) on the banks is a common sight,
the “_sola reliquia_” of some poor Hindoo, who departs this life by the
side of the stream, to which his body is afterwards committed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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