210 THE HIMALAYAS SEEN AFAR OFF. 



with them a good deal of this dust, and also of check- 

 ing the uprising of fresh clouds of it with every eddy 

 of air. 



Sir Joseph Hooker in the same way adverts to the 

 enormous distance at which the great range of the 

 Himalayas becomes visible from the Indian plains, at 

 this time " In the rainy season and immediately after- 

 wards" (he says) " the snowy Himalayas are distinctly 

 seen on the horizon fully 170 miles off." * 



These facts show the extreme clearness which at 

 times pervades the atmosphere upon the plains, es- 

 pecially, as we have said, in dry regions; whereas on 

 the other hand air saturated with moisture, as it is in 

 damp tropical districts, is generally more or less misty 

 in the far distance. But in dry tracts the perfect 

 limpidity of the atmosphere is frequently so complete 

 that the perspective becomes so altered from what we 

 are accustomed to at home, that it makes it very hard 

 to say how far off objects seen upon the plains actu- 

 ally are. 



The inexperienced eye therefore almost always con- 

 siderably under-estimates the distances, and the young 

 sportsman finds at first that his shots fall considerably 

 short of the mark, until he has acquired some little 

 experience of the new conditions he has to contend 

 with. This has the effect of producing a reaction on 

 the mind, which probably causes ranges to be over- 

 estimated for a while, so that some little time elapses 

 before things find their level, and before anything like 

 good shooting becomes possible. For this reason it is 

 all the more important to lose no opportunity of testing 



* Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal and the Himalayas, by Sir Joseph 

 D. Hooker, Vol. i., p. 86 (originally published in 1855). 



