able; and, to a person who has only travelled in the lower parts, and seen the better cultivated and more inhabited tracts of the country, scarcely credible. Perhaps a more complete and better marked example of this cannot be produced in any purely mountainous country, certainly not in that under consideration, than is exhibited in the features we see, marking the beds of the Sutlej, the Pabur, the Jumna, and the Bhagiruttee (the head of the Ganges.)

"The mountains which form the valley of the Sutlej, particularly on the north-west side, are brown, bar. ren, steep, and rocky; but they have these characters without the grandeur produced by lofty precipices or fringing wood. The nullahs that furrow them are dark, uninteresting chasms, and their breasts in general are unenlivened by cultivation; and, though their heights are thickly crowned with forts, there are no neat villages surrounded with trees, on which the eye may turn and rest from the dark desert around. Such are the Cooloo hills, which met our view from below Comharsein, even to beyond Seran. And on the Bischur side, though there may be somewhat more cultivation above, and wood yields its verdure here and there, to embellish the valleys, still the lower parts of the hills, for a descent of full three miles, to the narrow, rocky, and arid bed of the river, exhibit little except black rock peeping irregularly through brown burnt grass.

"The smiling vale of the Pabur, offers a delightful contrast to the black chasm through which the Sutlej rolls. We cannot speak of this river very near its source; but, from a long way beyond the village of Pooroo, which is seven miles above Raeengudh, it flows meandering through a valley of moderate breadth, in which pasture and crops are chequered with its dif

ferent streams; and on the banks and roots of the hills, rich cultivation, villages, and wood, form a lovely picture, which extends up the stream as far as the eye can distinguish, and till brown hills, topped with snow and rocks, close the prospect.

"If any success has attended the perhaps too detailed descriptions of the banks and bed of the Jumna, the reader will already have formed an idea of them: though rocky, precipitous, and wild, they are woody, green, and varied with sloping faces, which are rich with cultivation and verdure. Here and there the river runs through a level, though narrow bottom, and many well-cultivated and beautiful valleys lead into it; even at its source, though a wilder collection of requisites for a romantic and imposing landscape, as rock, wood, precipice, and snow, could not well be drawn together, they did not form so truly desert and stern a scene as is exhibited in the bed of the Bhagiruttee.

"I have said that these mountains are more lofty and bare; in fact, we had now penetrated farther into their higher and more inclement regions; and the Bhagiruttee, a far larger river than the Jumna, has worn a deeper bed, even in the stubborn materials of their bowels.

"It is not easy to describe the change of scene effected by this change of situation; not only is luxuriant foliage more rare, all rich and lively greens giving way to the dark brown of the fir, which spots the face of the rock; but even that rock is evidently more continually acted on by the severity of the storms. Instead of being covered with rich and varied hues, the effect of lichens and the smaller herbage, that usually clothe and variegate even a precipice, the rocks here are white, grey, red, or brown, the colour of their fracture, as if a constant violence was crum

bling them to pieces. Their sharp and splintered pinnacles spire up above the general mass; their middle region and feet are scantily sprinkled with the sombre, unvarying fir-tree; while the higher parts, retiring from the view, present little more than brown rock, except where a lofty mass of snow overtops them, and calls to our recollection how nearly and completely we are surrounded by it. No green smiling valleys yield their waters to the river; the white and foul torrents which swell its stream, pour their troubled tribute through chasms cleft in the solid rock, or are seen tumbling down its face, from the snow that gives them birth.

"The whole scene casts a damp on the mind; an indefinite idea of desert solitude and helplessness steals over it: we are, as it were, shut out from the world, and feel our nothingness."

Nothing, however, could equal the grandeur of the scene at Gungotree, a place sacred in the eyes of the Hindoos, and where the traveller is immediately in presence of that wonderful peak, whence the Ganges issues.

"The scene in which this holy place is situated, is worthy of the mysterious sanctity attributed to it, and the reverence with which it is regarded. The bare and peaked cliffs which shoot to the skies, yield not in ruggedness or elevation to any we have seen; their ruins lie in wild chaotic masses at their feet, and scantier wood imperfectly relieves their na

kedness; even the dark pine more rarely roots itself in the deep chasms which time has worn. Thus on all sides is the prospect closed, except in front to the eastward, where, from behind a mass of bare spires, four huge, lofty, snowy peaks arise; these are the peaks of Roodroo-Himmalah. There could be no finer finishing, no grander close, to such a scene.

"We approach it through a labyrinth of enormous shapeless masses of granite, which, during ages, have fallen from the cliffs above, that frown over the very temple, and, in all probability, will some day themselves descend in ruins and crush it. Around the enclosure, and among the masses, for some distance up the mountain, a few fine old pine-trees throw a dark shade, and form a magnificent foreground; while the river runs impetuously in its shingly bed, and the stifled but fearful sound of the stones which it rolls along with it, crushing together, mixes with the roar of its waters.

"We are now in the centre of the stupendous Himmalalı, the loftiest, and perhaps most rugged, range of mountains in the world. We were at the acknowledged source of that noble river, equally an object of veneration and a source of fertility, plenty, and opulence to Hindostan; and we had now reached the holiest shrine of Hindoo worship which these holy hills contain. These are surely striking considerations, combining with the solemn grandeur of the place, to move the feelings strongly.”