20 DR. HOOKER'S MISSION TO INDIA. 
employ, when anxious to make the most of a short residence amongst 
strange people. I have seen several of their tombs: all were mounds of 
earth, surrounded with a diminutive paling of sticks, placed cross-wise 
(like a garden-plot border), and had eggs and pebbles scattered over 
them. My Lepchas could not interpret this symbol. 
The little village, or rather hamlet of Singtam, is near the base of the 
.spur, and inhabited by Lepchas, Limbos, and Murmis, who are 
decidedly segregated in groups. The soil is a much richer, deeper 
loam than occurs about Darjeeling, where a stiffer clay prevails ; but I 
did not determine to what this difference between the soil of the upper 
and lower slopes of the same mountain is owing, whether to the nature 
of the rock, which from its felspathic nature abounds in alumina* 
above, or to the presence of other materials tansported, or if it is 
due to the disintegration of a different rock below. Here no stone 
was exposed, but a little lower down mica-schist was the prevailing 
species. In these positions the soil is very fertile, owing in part to the 
ashes of the tall forest, destroyed to make room for agriculture. Rice, 
of species requiring no irrigation, Panica, Paspala, Eleusine, and 
Milium, are the Cerealia,—Buck-wheat and Barley frequent higher levels. 
A solitary blackened tree-stump, often hollow, disfigures the fields, and 
is used as a look-out post, where a watcher guards his field by 
night from the ravages of the bears and deer, which occasionally fall 
victims to his poisoned arrow. Nothing is so striking as the great 
steepness of the cultivated spots. So good a soil, well manured, more- 
over, by the burnt ashes of the aboriginal vegetation, must be highly pro- 
ductive; but where it coats a steep hill-slope, and is exposed to the 
rains of five months, it cannot long remain so, and may therefore 
-possibly afford a clue to the wandering habits of the Lepcha, who never 
holds his land for more than three years, at the expiration of which 
time he seeks a new site. 
The large Bamboo and Gordonia Wallichii are the prevailing 
botanical features of the dry earthy slopes of all these spurs. "The 
latter ascends to 4,000 feet; the former (of this species), scarcely so 
high. There are, however, so many kinds of Bamboo, they so seldom 
flower, require so much experience in their native states, and so cautious 
* The subsoil, or clayey stratum, frequent over the gneiss rock of Darjeeling, 
contains 30 per cent. of alumina, according to an analysis made for me by my 
excellent friends Messrs. J. and C. Müller. 
