400 Mr. A. Hume on Indian Oniifhologij. 



above the level of the sea, rise from 200 to 1200 feet above the 

 surrounding plain, few, if any (except Mount Aboo), much ex- 

 ceeding in height the Taragurh Hill at Ajmere, which is said 

 to have an elevation of 2900 feet. 



This chain, so far as 1 am acquainted with it, is composed 

 almost exclusively of metamorphic rocks, — granite, greenstone, 

 micaceous schists, syenite, and quartz, with various altered 

 sandstones, being the characteristic minerals, though patches of 

 limestone and marble are quarried more or less in many loca- 

 lities. Very bare, bleak in winter and burning in summer, 

 these hills, often conveying the idea of huge barrows of rocky 

 debris, can boast scarcely any vegetation, except multitudes of 

 huge candelabra-like, many-thorned, succulent Euphorbia, and 

 a more or less sparse growth of lanky ghost-like grass, which 

 always appears withered and dead. Wrapt in the hues of dis- 

 tance, these rugged and often very fantastically shaped hills 

 and groups of hillocks afford the most beautiful backgrounds to 

 every view, and give an inexpressible charm to every landscape, 

 especially to those fresh from the rich but unvaryingly level 

 plains of the rest of Upper India. Seen, however, close at 

 hand they are bare, and in many cases desolate to a degree ; and 

 they are, in their sameness and churlish ruggedness, as wearying 

 and discouraging to the traveller as they are, with rare excep- 

 tions, unproductive to the ornithologist. 



A few pairs of the beautiful Banded Rock- Grouse {Pterocles 

 fasciatus), of the Jugger-Falcon {Falco juggur), of the Brown 

 Rock-Chat [Cercomela fusca), and of the Red-winged Bush- 

 Lark [Mirafra erythroptera), with large companies of the Long- 

 billed Vulture [Gyps indicus), all of which breed here, together 

 with numbers of the Striolated Bunting, almost complete the 

 catalogue of the resident avifauna, supplemented during the 

 cold season by little flocks of Hutton's and Stewart^s Buntings 

 [Emberiza huttoni and E. stewarti) and solitary individuals of 

 our well-known Pipit (undistinguishable from Pipastes arbor eus 

 of Europe), the Brown Rock-Pipit [Corydalla griseorufescens, 

 nobis"^), and the Common Kestrel [Tinnunculus alaudarius). 



Dreary and uninteresting as they seem to us, these great 

 [Cf. (tntea, p. 28G.— Ed.] 



