THE FOOTHILLS 87 



cms. Bamboos shoot up through the undergrowth 

 to a hundred feet or more in height. The fallen 

 trees are richly clothed with ferns typical of the 

 hottest and dampest climates. And dendrobiums 

 and other orchids fasten on the branches. 



At Kurseong there is another striking change, 

 for the vegetation now becomes more characteristic 

 of the temperate zone. The spring here vividly 

 recalls the spring in England. Oaks of a noble 

 species and magnificent foliage are flowering and 

 the birch bursting into leaf. The violet, straw- 

 berry, maple, geranium, and bramble appear, and 

 mosses and lichens carpet the banks and roadsides. 

 But the species of these plants differ from their 

 European prototypes, and are accompanied at this 

 elevation (and for 2,000 feet higher up) with tree 

 ferns forty feet in height, bananas, palms, figs, 

 pepper, numbers of epiphytal orchids, and similar 

 genuine tropical genera. 



From Kurseong we ascend through a magnifi- 

 cent forest of chestnut, walnut, oaks, and laurels. 

 Hooker, when he subsequently visited the Khasia 

 Hills in Assam, said that though the subtropical 

 scenery on the outer Himalaya was on a much more 

 gigantic scale, it was not comparable in beauty and 

 luxuriance with the really tropical vegetation in- 

 duced by the hot, damp, and insular climate of 

 those perennially humid Khasia Hills. The forest 

 of gigantic trees on the Himalaya, many of them 

 deciduous, appear from a distance as masses of dark 

 grey foliage, clothing mountains 10,000 feet high. 

 Whereas in the Khasia Hills the individual trees are 



