1. I am the Spiritual and Temporal Chief of the Realm. 2. The Defender of the Faith. 3. Equal to Saruswati in learning. 4. Chief of all the Boodhs. 5. Head expounder of the Shasters. 6. Caster out of devils. 7. The most learned in the Holy Laws. 8. An Avatar of God (or, by God's will). 9. Absolver of sins. 10. I am above all the Lamas of the Dookpa Creed. 11. I am of the best of all Religions—the Dookpa. 12. The punisher of unbelievers. 18. Unequalled in expounding the Shasters. 14. Unequalled in holiness and wisdom. 15. The head (or fountain) of all Religious Knowledge. 16. The Enemy of all false Avatars.
CHAPTER XVII.
EXCURSION TO TERAI.
Dispatch collections — Acorns — Heat — Punkabaree — Bees — Vegetation — Haze — Titalya — Earthquake — Proceed to Nepal frontier — Terai, geology of — Physical features of Himalayan valleys — Elephants, purchase of, etc. — Riverbeds — Mechi river — Return to Titalya — Leave for Teesta — Climate of plains — Jeelpigoree — Cooches — Alteration in the appearance of country by fires, etc. — Grasses — Bamboos — Cottages — Rajah of Cooch Behar — Condition of people — Hooli festival — Ascend Teesta — Canoes — Cranes — Forest — Baikant-pore — Rummai — Religion — Plants at foot of mountains — Exit of Teesta — Canoe voyage down to Rangamally — English genera of plants — Birds — Beautiful Scenery — Botanizing on elephants — Willow — Siligoree — Cross Terai — Geology — Iron — Lohar-ghur — Coal and sandstone beds — Mechi fisherman — Hailstorm — Ascent to Khersiong — To Dorjiling — Vegetation — Geology — Folded quartz-beds — Spheres of feldspar — Lime deposits.
Having arranged the collections (amounting to eighty loads) made during 1848, they were conveyed by coolies to the foot of the hills, where carts were provided to carry them five days' journey to the Mahanuddy river, which flows into the Ganges, whence they were transported by water to Calcutta.
On the 27th of February, I left Dorjiling to join Mr. Hodgson, at Titalya on the plains. The weather was raw, cold, and threatening: snow lay here and there at 7000 feet, and all vegetation was very backward, and wore a wintry garb. The laurels, maples, and deciduous-leaved oaks, hydrangea and cherry, were leafless, but the abundance of chesnuts and evergreen oaks, rhododendrons, Aucuba, Linonia, and other shrubs, kept the forest well clothed. The oaks had borne a very unusual number of acorns during the last season, which were now falling, and strewing the road in some places so abundantly, that it was hardly safe to ride down hill.
The plains of Bengal were all but obscured by a dense haze, partly owing to a peculiar state of the atmosphere that prevails in the dry months, and partly to the fires raging in the Terai forest, from which white wreaths of smoke ascended, stretching obliquely for miles to the eastward, and filling the air with black particles of grass-stems, carried 4000 feet aloft by the heated ascending currents that impinge against the flanks of the mountains.
In the tropical region the air was scented with the white blossoms of the Vitex Agnus-castus, which grew in profusion by the road-side; but the forest, which had looked so gigantic on my arrival at the mountains the previous year, appeared small after the far more lofty and bulky oaks and pines of the upper regions of the Himalaya.
The evening was sultry and close, the heated surface of the earth seemed to load the surrounding atmosphere with warm vapours, and the sensation, as compared with the cool pure air of Dorjiling, was that of entering a confined tropical harbour after a long sea-voyage.
I slept in the little bungalow of Punkabaree, and was wakened next morning by sounds to which I had long been a stranger, the voices of innumerable birds, and the humming of great bees that bore large holes for their dwellings in the beams and rafters of houses: never before had I been so forcibly struck with the absence of animal life in the regions of the upper Himalaya.