[71] A plant allied to Daphne, from whose bark the Nepal paper is manufactured. It was named after the eminent Indian botanist, brother of the late Miss Edgeworth.
Above this the road followed the west bank of the river; the latter was a furious torrent, flowing through a gorge, fringed with a sombre vegetation, damp, and dripping with moisture, and covered with long Usnea and pendulous mosses. The road was very rocky and difficult, sometimes leading along bluff faces of cliffs by wooden steps and single rotten planks. At 8000 feet I met with pines, whose trunks I had seen strewing the river for some miles lower down: the first that occurred was Abies Brunoniana, a beautiful species, which forms a stately blunt pyramid, with branches spreading like the cedar, but not so stiff, and drooping gracefully on all sides. It is unknown on the outer ranges of Sikkim, and in the interior occupies a belt about 1000 feet lower than the silver fir (A. Webbiana). Many sub-alpine plants occur here, as Lecesteria, Thalictrum, rose, thistles, alder, birch, ferns, bcrberry, holly, anemone, strawberry, raspberry, Gnaphalium, the alpine bamboo, and oaks. The scenery is as grand as any pictured by Salvator Rosa; a river roaring in sheets of foam, sombre woods, crags of gneiss, and tier upon tier of lofty mountains flanked and crested with groves of black firs, terminating in snow-sprinkled rocky peaks.
I now found the temperature getting rapidly cooler, both that of the air, which here at 8,066 feet fell to 32° in the night, and that of the river, which was always below 40°. It was in these narrow valleys only, that I observed the return cold current rushing down the river-courses during the nights, which were usually brilliant and very cold, with copious dew: so powerful, indeed, was the radiation, that the upper blanket of my bed became coated with moisture, from the rapid abstraction of heat by the frozen tarpaulin of my tent.
The rivers here are often fringed by flats of shingle, on which grow magnificent yews and pines; some of the latter were from 120 to 150 feet high, and had been blown down, owing to their scanty hold on the soil. I measured one, Abies Brunoniana, twenty feet in girth. Many alpine rhododendrons occur at 9000 feet, with Astragalis and creeping Tamarisk. Three miles below Wallanchoon the river forks, being met by the Yangma from the north-east; they are impetuous torrents of about equal volume; the Tambur especially (here called the Walloong) is often broken into cascades, and cuts a deep gorge-like channel.
I arrived at the village of Wallanchoon on the 23rd of November. It is elevated 10,385 feet, and situated in a fine open part of the Tambur valley, differing from any part lower down in all its natural features; being broad, with a rapid but not turbulent stream, very grassy, and both the base and sides of the flanking mountains covered with luxuriant dense bushes of rhododendron, rose, berberry and juniper. Red-legged crows, hawks, wild pigeons, and finches, abounded. There was but little snow on the mountains around, which are bare and craggy above, but sloping below. Bleak and forbidding as the situation of any Himalayan village at 10,000 feet elevation must be, that of Wallanchoon is rendered the more so from the comparatively few trees; for though the silver fir and juniper are both abundant higher up the valley, they have been felled here for building materials, fuel, and export to Tibet. From the naked limbs and tall gaunt black trunks of those that remain, stringy masses of bleached lichen (Usnea) many feet long, stream in the wind. Both men and women seemed fond of decorating their hair with wreaths of this lichen, which they dye yellow with leaves of Symplocos.
The village is very large, and occupies a flat on the east bank of the river, covered with huge boulders: the ascent to it is extremely steep, probably over an ancient moraine, though I did not recognise it as such at the time. Cresting this, the valley at once opens, and I was almost startled with the sudden change from a gloomy gorge to a broad flat and a populous village of large and good painted wooden houses, ornamented with hundreds of long poles and vertical flags, looking like the fleet of some foreign port; while a swarm of good-natured, intolerably dirty Tibetans, were kotowing to me as I advanced.