BIG LANDSLIPS. 209 



interest. Here he would draw my attention to a great chair- 

 like rock, on which he said the rajah used to sit and hold his 

 court ; there, to some curious beetling crags, once the site of the 

 royal stables, but now where gooral and other game had 

 scraped out large cavities below the rocks, in partaking of 

 the kar (salt) with which the earth there was strongly im- 

 pregnated. Then he would relate how his grandfather had, 

 sometimes during the dead of night, heard the neighing of 

 horses, the baying of dogs, and the sounds of revelry borne 

 down on the wind towards his village from the crags above, 

 which my informant firmly believed were still haunted by the 

 ghosts of the departed ; and how, but a year or two before, 

 the inhabitants of his village had been terror-stricken one 

 night by a fearful noise caused by the falling of an enormous 

 landslip, the roar of which sounded, he said, as if the whole 

 hill were tumbling and going to bury them beneath it. 



These big landslips are very common in the Himalayas, 

 more especially during the rainy season, at times when the 

 saturation of the mountains with moisture is excessive. The 

 terrible landslip which occurred at the Himalayan sanitarium 

 of Nynee Tal in 1880, when so many of our fellow-country- 

 men and an unknown number of natives were in a few 

 moments hurled into eternity by the fall of a whole hillside 

 into the lake there, is a matter of history. My wife, who was 

 at the time residing in a house within only a quarter of a 

 mile of the edge of the slip, has told me many a harrowing 

 tale of this awful catastrophe. I may also mention a very 

 extraordinary but less disastrous kind of landslip, of which 

 the following is a description, as related to me by Colonel E. 

 Smyth, who was for many years superintendent of the educa- 

 tinnal department of Kumaon and Gurhwal. 1 



1 The late Pundit Nain Sing, the celebrated Asiatic explorer, who was 

 awarded one of the Royal medals by the Royal Geographical Society for his 

 rateable services, was originally one of Colonel Smyth's native schoolmaster*, 

 and was sent by him to Colonel Montgomerie of the Trigonometrical Survey of 

 India, for employment as an explorer 



O 



