Aug. 1849. CULTIVATION AT LACHOONG. lo-l 



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The river is fourteen yards broad, and 'neither deep nor 

 rapid : the village is on the east bank, and is large for 

 Sikkini ; it contains fully 100 good wooden houses, raised 

 on posts, and clustered together without order. It was 

 muddy and intolerably filthy, and intersected by some 

 small streams, whose beds formed the roads, and, at the 

 same time, the common sewers of the natives. There is 

 some wretched cultivation in fields,* of wheat, barley, peas, 

 radishes, and turnips. Rice was once cultivated at this 

 elevation (8000 feet), but the crop was uncertain ; some 

 very tropical grasses grow wild here, as Eragrcmtis and 

 Panicum. In gardens the hollyhock is seen : it is said to be 

 introduced through Tibet from China ; also Pi?ius excelsa 

 from Bhotan, peaches, walnuts, and weeping willows. A 

 tall poplar was pointed out to me as a great wonder ; it 

 had two species of Pgrus growing on its boughs, evidently 

 from seed ; one was a mountain ash, the other like Pyrus 

 Aria. 



Soon after camping, the Lachoong Phipun, a very tall, 

 intelligent, and agreeable looking man, waited on me with 

 the usual presents, and a request that I would visit his sick 

 father. His house was lofty and airy : in the inner room 

 the sick man was stretched on a board, covered with a 

 blanket, and dying of pressure on the brain ; he was sur- 

 rounded by a deputation of Lamas from Teshoo Loombo, 

 sent for in this emergency. The principal one was a fat 

 fellow, who sat cross-legged before a block-printed Tibetan 



of stratified pebbles and sand on the north flank of the Lavanchi moraine how- 

 ever, which I failed to discover in those of Lachoong. The average slope of 

 these pine-clad Sikkim valleys much approximates to that of Chamouni, and 

 never approaches the precipitous character of the Bernese Alps' valleys, Kandersteg, 

 Lauterbrunnen, and Grindelwald. 



* Full of such English weeds as shepherd's purse, nettles, Solarium nigrum, and 

 dock; besides many Himalayan ones, as balsams, thistles, a beautiful geranium, 

 mallow, Haloragh and Gucurbitaceous plants. 



