FOREST-WILD BEASTS. 369 have no occasion to go far from home, or to make long marches, these luxuries are less cumbersome than they would be to me; while, on the other hand, they pass so much of their time in the fields, that a large and comfortable tent is to the full as necessary for them as a bungalow. Mr. Boulderson had good-naturedly waited two days at Shahee to give me time to overtake him, and now offered to accompany me to the foot of the hills at least, if not the first stage amongst them. In the passage of the forest, with which he is well acquainted, he says he expects to be of service to me. He strongly recommends our pushing on through the forest in a single march. The distance, he allows, is too great, being 26 miles; but he regards it as a less evil to ourselves, our attendants, and animals, than remaining a day and night at Tandah, the intermediate station, a spot which at no season of the year can be considered as quite safe, either from fever or tigers. Against the former of these dangers I had been furnished with a set of instructions by Mr. Knight, the station surgeon of Bareilly. Natives, Mr. Knight thinks, are more liable to the complaint, and recover from it with greater difficulty, than Europeans, who are, in the first instance, better protected against the damp and unwholesome air, and whose full habit of living, and the high temperature of their health, make the work of depletion with them at once more easy and more effectual, than with men whose pulse is always feeble, and who sink at once into despondency on the attack of a disease which they know to be dangerous. As to tigers, though we may possibly hear their roars, and see traces of their feet, it is not often that they venture near the fires of an encampment, or the formidable multitude of men which such an encampment as mine presents to them. Still, if a tiger shows himself, it will, in all probability, be at Tandah; and though I should not dislike to see the animal in its natural state, I am bound, for the sake of my half-naked and careless followers, and my numerous train of animals, still more than my own, not to linger twelve hours in a spot of so bad reputation. In the day time, at this season, and by those who merely pass along the beaten track, neither fevers nor tigers are usually to be apprehended. The latter, indeed, on any approaching bustle, keep themselves, at those hours, so close in cover, that those who seek them find it difficult enough to start them. Mr. Boulderson is a keen sportsman, and told me several interesting facts respecting the wild animals of this neighbourhood. The lion, which was long supposed to be unknown in India, is now ascertained to exist in considerable numbers in the districts of Saharunpoor and Loodianah. Lions have likewise been killed on this side the Ganges, in the northern parts of Rohilcund, in the neighbourhood of Moradabad and Rampoor, as large, it is said, as the VOL. I.-47 370 HIMALAYA MOUNTAINS. average of those in the neighbourhood of the Cape of Good Hope. Both lions, where they are found, and tigers, are very troublesome to the people of the villages near the forest, who, having no elephants, have no very effectual means of attacking them with safety. The peasantry here, however, are not a people to allow themselves to be devoured without resistance, like the Bengalees; and it often happens that, when a tiger has established himself near a village, the whole population turn out, with their matchlocks, swords, and shields, to attack him. Fighting on foot, and compelled to drive him from his covert by entering and beating the jungle, one or two generally lose their lives, but the tiger seldom escapes; and Mr. Boulderson has seen some skins of animals of this description, which bore the strongest marks of having been fought with, if the expression may be used, hand to hand; and were in fact slashed all over with cuts of the "tulwar," or short scimitar. A reward of four rupees for every tiger's head brought in, is given by Government; and if the villagers of any district report that a tiger or lion is in their neighbourhood, there are seldom wanting sportsmen among the civil or military officers, who hear the news with pleasure, and make haste to rid them of the nuisance. A good shot, on an elephant, seldom fails, with perfect safety to himself, to destroy as many of these terrible animals as he falls in with. In the afternoon Mr. Boulderson took me a drive in his buggy. This is a vehicle in which all Anglo-Indians delight, and certainly its hood is a great advantage, by enabling them to pay visits, and even to travel, under a far hotter sun than would otherwise be endurable. The country, however, in this neighbourhood, and every where except in the immediate vicinity of the principal stations, is strangely unfavourable for such vehicles. Our drive was over ploughed fields, and soon terminated by a small, but, to us, impassable, ravine. We had, however, a first view of the range of the Himalaya, indistinctly seen through the haze, but not so indistinctly as to conceal the general form of the mountains. The nearer hills are blue, and in outline and tints resemble pretty closely, at this distance, those which close in the vale of Clwyd. Above these rose, what might, in the present unfavourable atmosphere, have been taken for clouds, had not their seat been so stationary and their outline so harsh and pyramidical, the patriarchs of the continent, perhaps the surviving ruins of a former world, white and glistening as alabaster, and even at this distance of, probably, 150 miles, towering above the nearer and secondary range, as much as these last (though said to be 7600 feet high) are above the plain on which we were standing. I felt intense delight and awe in looking on them, but the pleasure lasted not many minutes, the clouds closed in again, as on the fairy castle of HIMALAYA MOUNTAINS. 371 St. John, and left us but the former gray cold horizon, girding in the green plain of Rohilcund, and broken only by scattered tufts of peepul and mangoe-trees. November 19.-This morning we went seven coss to Sheeshghur, over a worse cultivated country than the last day's stage, and one which had, evidently, suffered much from want of rain. The heavy and happy fall which had given plenty to Oude and the Dooab did not extend here, and except in a few places, where irrigation had been used, the rice and Indian corn had generally failed, and the wheat and barley were looking very ill. Where there are rivers or streams, irrigation is practised industriously and successfully; but there are few wells, and they do not seem, as in the Dooab and Oude, to draw water from them by oxen for their fields. The rain which falls is, in most seasons, said to be sufficient. On leaving our encampment we forded the river Bhagool, and afterwards, once or twice, fell in, during our march, with its windings. At last, soon after the sun rose, and just as we had reached a small rising ground, the mist rolled away and showed us again the Himalaya, distinct and dark, with the glorious icy mountains, towering in a clear blue sky, above the nearer range. There were four of these, the names of three of which Mr. Boulderson knew, Bhadrinâth, Kedar Nâth, and the peak above the source of the Ganges, the Meru of Hindoo fable. The fourth, to the extreme right, he did not know, and I could not find it in Arrowsmith's map. Bhadrinâth, he told me, is reckoned the highest. From hence, however, it is not the most conspicuous of the four. That we saw the snowy peaks at all, considering their distance, and that mountains twice as high as Snowdon intervened, is wonderful. I need hardly say that I wished for my wife to share the sight with me. But I thought of Tandah and the Terrai, and felt, on recollection, that I should have probably been in considerable uneasiness, if she and the children had been to pass the intervening inhospitable country. Sheeshghur is a poor village, on a trifling elevation which is conspicuous in this level country. It has a ruinous fort on its summit, and altogether, with the great surrounding flat and the blue hills behind it, put me in mind of some views of Rhydlan. The Clwydian chain, indeed, is not crowned by such noble pinnacles as Bhadrinâth and Gangotree, but I could not help feeling now, and I felt it still more when I began to attempt to commit the prospect to paper, that the awe and wonder which I experienced were of a very complex character, and greatly detached from the simple act of vision. The eye is, by itself, and without some objects to form a comparison, unable to judge of such heights at such a distance. Carneth Llewellyn and Snowdon, at certain times in the year, make, really, as good a picture as the mountains now before me; and the reason that I am so much more impressed with the present view, is partly the mysterious idea of awful and inaccessible remoteness attached to the Indian Caucasus, the centre of earth, "Its Altar, and its Cradle, and its Throne;" and still more the knowledge derived from books, that the objects now before me are really among the greatest earthly works of the Almighty Creator's hands,-the highest spots below the moonand out-topping, by many hundred feet, the summits of Cotopasi and Chimborazo. I had two sets of visiters to-day, the first were a set of Nâtchwomen, accompanied by a man, who beat a small drum, and a naked boy, who seemed the son of the elder of the three females. The whole party were of the "cunja," or gipsey caste, with all its most striking peculiarities. The women would have been good-looking, had not their noses been distorted, and their ears lengthened by the weighty ornaments suspended from them. Their arms, legs, and necks were loaded with rings and chains, and their dress was as tawdrily fine as their poverty would admit of. The man and boy were, in all respects but clothing, the same description of animal which might steal a hen or open a gate for a traveller in the neighbourhood of Norwood. I gave them a trifle, but declined seeing their performance. The second set of visiters were an old Raja and three sons and a grandson, who were introduced by Mr. Boulderson. Their ancestors had possessed a considerable territory, but the Patan wars had lowered them down to simple, and far from wealthy, landowners, whose main dependence is, at present, on a pension of 4,000 s. rupees a year, allowed them by the Company. The Raja was a homely, cheerful old man, with a white beard and unusually fair complexion; and excepting the few swords and shields in his train, neither he nor his sons had much which differed from the English idea of respectable yeomen. Their visit was not long: I gave them, at taking leave, lavender-water by way of pawn and attar; and the old Raja (on account of the supposed sanctity of my character, in which I heartily wish I more accorded with their ideas of me) desired me to lay my hand on his back and that of his sons, and bless them. His business with Mr. Boulderson chiefly respected an embankment which he wished to make on the neighbouring small river Kullee, in order to throw the water over many acres of land, some of which we had crossed, which were now altogether dependant on rain, and sometimes, as in the present year, unproductive. The embankment had been commenced, but was opposed by the Nawâb of Rampoor, a descendant of Ali Mo MALARIA. hammed Khân already mentioned, and who still holds a very pro- Mr. Boulderson said he was sorry to learn from the Raja that he did not consider the unhealthy season of the Terrai as yet quite over. He therefore proposed that we should make a long march of above twenty miles the following day to Ruderpoor, in order to be as short a time in the dangerous country as possible. I was, for several reasons, of a different opinion. My people and sepoys had already had two long marches through very bad and fatiguing roads. That to Ruderpoor was described as worse than As Ruderpoor is reckoned only a any which we had yet seen. shade less dangerous than Tandah, to halt there on the Sunday would be impossible, and we should have on that day also a march of twenty-five miles through the forest to Bamoury. Besides my. reluctance to subject the men to so great fatigue on such a day, I had always understood that lassitude was among the most powerful predisposing causes to fever, and I could not think, without uneasiness, of any of them being tired out and lagging behind in so horrible a country. The direct way to Ruderpoor lay through the Nawâb's territory; and Manpoor, the intervening station, was by no means a desirable one, either from its air or the mutinous character of its inhabitants. A little to the right, however, was a village named Kulleanpoor, within the Company's border, and at least not more unwholesome than its neighbours. The distance was eight or nine short coss, which would do nobody any harm. There would remain a stage of six or seven miles to Ruderpoor on Sunday, which might be done without any nightly travelling, and leave both men and cattle fresh next morning for our long march to the mountains. For Europeans there was in either place little risk; our warm clothing, warm tents, elevated bedsteads, musquito nets, (a known preservative against malaria,) and our port wine, would probably be sufficient safeguards; but for the poor fellows who sleep on the ground, and are as careless |