From Nurtiung we walked to the Bor-panee river, sixteen or twenty miles to the north-east (not the river of that name below Nunklow), returning the same night; a most fatiguing journey in so hot and damp a climate. The path lay for the greatest part of the way over grassy hills of mica-schist, with boulders of granite, and afterwards of syenite, like those of Nunklow. The descent to the river is through noble woods of spreading oaks,* [We collected upwards of fifteen kinds of oak and chesnut in these and the Khasia mountains; many are magnificent trees, with excellent wood, while others are inferior as timber.] chesnuts, magnolias, and tall pines: the vegetation is very tropical, and with the exception of there being no sal, it resembles that of the dry hills of the Sikkim Terai. The Bor-panee is forty yards broad, and turbid; its bed, which is of basalt, is 2,454 feet above the sea: it is crossed by a raft pulled to and fro by canes. Nurtiung contains a most remarkable collection of those sepulchral and other monuments, which form so curious a feature in the scenery of these mountains and in the habits of their savage population. They are all placed in a fine grove of trees, occupying a hollow; where several acres are covered with gigantic, generally circular, slabs of stone, from ten to twenty-five feet broad, supported five feet above the ground upon other blocks. For the most part they are buried in brushwood of nettles and shrubs, but in one place there is an open area of fifty yards encircled by them, each with a gigantic headstone behind it. Of the latter the tallest was nearly thirty feet high, six broad, and two feet eight inches in thickness, and must have been sunk at least five feet, and perhaps much more, in the ground. The flat slabs were generally of slate or hornstone; but many of them, and all the larger ones, were of syenitic granite, split by heat and cold water with great art. They are erected by dint of sheer brute strength, the lever being the only aid. Large blocks of syenite were scattered amongst these wonderful erections. Splendid trees of _Bombax,_ fig and banyan, overshadowed them: the largest banyan had a trunk five feet in diameter, clear of the buttresses, and numerous small trees of _Celtic_ grew out of it, and an immense flowering tuft of _Vanda caerulea_ (the rarest and most beautiful of Indian orchids) flourished on one of its limbs. A small plantain with austere woolly scarlet fruit, bearing ripe seeds, was planted in this sacred grove, where trees of the most tropical genera grew mixed with the pine, birch, _Myrica,_ and _Viburnum._