DARJEELING TO TONGLO. 55 
of fruiting. In short, some English fruits will be content to turn the - 
winter solstice (November to May) of the plains of India into an English 
summer, and then produce their flower and fruit ;—but neither these, 
nor others, will put up with the accumulated evils of a winter like that 
of England* (as concerns its effects on European vegetation), and a 
summer more rainy than that of the plains, —for such are the two solstices 
of Darjeeling. 
The difference between this climate and that of the north-western 
Himalaya, at equal elevations, several degrees further north and west, 
is herein very great. There the winters are much colder and more 
comfortless to the English visiter; the summer is far hotter and less 
rainy (but afflicted with dust-winds in May). The rainy season is so 
much shorter, and the sun so much more frequently shines through the 
more brief but heavier showers, that the apple and many other fruits are 
brought to far greater perfection than here. Still further north- 
west, and beyond the influence of the periodical rains (which deluge 
the south-eastern Himalaya, and gradually are exhausted, being carried 
north-west by the south-eastern monsoon), the European fruits are 
celebrated as the finest in the world. Whether the Grapes, Apples, 
Melons, &c., of Caubul, Turkistan, Cashmere, &e., are really equal to 
the English, or not, I am without the means of judging : those who 
affirm this most positively are Indian residents, who have left England 
"when young and have sojourned long in the plains, where Pomona’s 
gifts are scarcer and poorer than in any tropical country I have ever 
visited.t The opinion of the travellers in these countries, who have left 
England later in life, with their tastes more matured and recent, is, ` 
that though the oriental fruits are greater in abundance, and excellent 
in- flavour, they are not comparable to the better varieties of the 
same cultivated in England, the north of France, Belgium, and Hol- 
land. In the valley of Nepal, at-Cattmandu, above 4,000 feet, and 
in the heart of the Sub-Himalaya, Hodgson tells me Apples ripen 
* I do not mean that the Darjeeling winter is to be compared for cold or discom- 
fort to that season in England; but as far as being a winter to English fruit-trees, 
its specific action on the plant is the same. 
t This is not stated unadvisedly nor without wide experience. The excellence of the — 
Mango Y do not deny, nor of one or two of the ennt of inen but Sire 2 
particular sorts are searce, comparatively speaking; they have seasons, and so — 
have the good oranges. No one who has walked through the fruit-market of'a 
tropical American town, ora western African, and seen their glorious perennial m e 
sion, of not only species, but varieties of fruit, will for a moment compare the 
Bazaar to these. So say all who have frequented both. debes c 
