VIEW FROM THE PILGRIM’S BANGLĀ.
Sketched on the Spot by فاني پارکس
The road was remarkably picturesque, the wind high and cold—a delightful breeze, the sky cloudy, and the scenery beautiful: I enjoyed a charming ride, returned home laden with wild flowers, and found amusement for some hours, comparing them with Loudon’s Encyclopedia. A pony, that was grazing on the side of Landowr close to my house, fell down the precipice, and was instantly killed: my ayha came to tell me that the privates of the 16th Lancers and of the Buffs ate horseflesh, for she had seen one of them bring up a quantity of the pony’s flesh in a towel;—I ventured to observe, the man might have dogs to feed.
VIEW FROM THE PILGRIM’S BANGLĀ.
19th.—The view from the verandah of my banglā or house is very beautiful: directly beneath it is a precipice; opposite is that part of the hill of Landowr on which stands the sanatorium for the military, at present occupied by the invalids of the 16th Lancers and of the Buffs. The hill is covered with grass, and the wild potato grows there in profusion; beyond is a high steep rock, which can only be ascended by a very precipitous path on one side of it; it is crowned by a house called Lall Tība, and is covered with oak and rhododendron trees. Below, surrounded with trees, stands the house of Mr. Connolly; and beyond that, in the distance, are the snow-covered mountains of the lower range of the Himalaya. The road—if the narrow pathway, three feet in breadth, may deserve so dignified an appellation—is to the right, on the edge of a precipice, and on the other side is the perpendicular rock out of which it has been cut. This morning I heard an outcry, and ran to see what had happened; just below, and directly in front of my house, an accident had occurred: an officer of the Buffs had sent a valuable horse down the hill, in charge of his groom; they met some mules laden with water-bags, where the path was narrow, the bank perpendicular on the one side, and the precipice on the other; the groom led the horse on the side of the precipice, he kicked at the mules, his feet descended over the edge of the road, and down he went—a dreadful fall, a horrible crash; the animal was dead ere he reached a spot where a tree stopped his further descent: the precipice is almost perpendicular.
22nd.—Found a glow-worm of immense size on the side of the hill: a winged glow-worm flew in, and alighted on the table; it is small, not a quarter the size of the other.
23rd.—During the night, some animal came into the verandah, killed one of the Moonāl hen pheasants, and wounded the cock bird so severely that he will die. There is a wild-beast track on the side of the hill opposite my house, along which I have several times seen some animal skulking in the dusk of the evening.
25th.—Accompanied some friends to breakfast in my cottage-tent at Cloud End. We laid out a garden, and sowed flower seeds around the spot where my little tent is pitched, beneath the trees; while thus employed, I found a scorpion among the moss and leaves where I was sitting, which induced me to repeat those lines of Byron:—
“The mind that broods o’er guilty woes