Himalayan Journals — Volume 2: 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 — Volume 2: 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
The scenery varies extremely at different parts of the surface.
Towards the flat portion, where the English reside, the aspect is as
bleak and inhospitable as can be imagined: a thin stratum of marshy
or sandy soil covers a tabular mass of cold red sandstone; and there
is not a tree, and scarcely a shrub to be seen, except occasional
clumps of Pandanus. The low white bungalows are few in number, and
very scattered, some of them being a mile asunder, enclosed with
stone walls and shrubs; and a small white church, disused on account
of the damp, stands lonely in the centre of all.
The views from the margins of this plateau are magnificent: 4000 feet
below are bay-like valleys, carpetted as with green velvet, from
which rise tall palms, tree-ferns with spreading crowns, and rattans
shooting their pointed heads, surrounded with feathery foliage, as
with ostrich plumes, far above the great trees. Beyond are the
Jheels, looking like a broad shallow sea with the tide half out,
bounded in the blue distance by the low-hills of Tipperah. To the
right and left are the scarped red rocks and roaring waterfalls,
shooting far over the cliff's, and then arching their necks as they
expand in feathery foam, over which rainbows float, forming and
dissolving as the wind sways the curtains of spray from side to side.
To the south of Churra the lime and coal measures rise abruptly in
flat-topped craggy hills, covered with brushwood and small trees.
Similar hills are seen far westward across the intervening valleys in
the Garrow country, rising in a series of steep isolated ranges, 300
to 400 feet above the general level of the country, and always
skirting the south face of the mountains. Considerable caverns
penetrate the limestone, the broken surface of which rock presents
many picturesque and beautiful spots, like the same rocks in England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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