54 SOANE VALLEY. Chap. II. 



the Hardwickia, about 120 feet high, was as handsome a 

 monarch of the forest as I ever saw, and it is not often 

 that one sees trees in the tropics, which for a combination 

 of beauty in outline, harmony of colour, and arrangement 

 of branches and foliage, would form so striking an addition 

 to an English park. 



There is a large break in the Kymore hills here, beyond 

 the village of Kunch, through which our route lay to Bee- 

 jaghur, and the Ganges at Mirzapore; the cliffs leaving 

 the river and trending to the north in a continuous escarp- 

 ment flanked with low ranges of rounded hills, and termi- 

 nating in an abrupt spur (Mungeesa Peak) whose summit 

 was covered with a ragged forest. At Kunch we saw four 

 alligators sleeping in the river, looking at a distance like 

 logs of wood, all of the short-nosed or mugger kind, dreaded 

 by man and beast ; I saw none of the sharp-snouted (or 

 garial), so common on the Ganges, where their long bills, 

 with a garniture of teeth and prominent eyes peeping out of 

 the water, remind one of geological lectures and visions of 

 Ichthyosauri. Tortoises were frequent in the river, basking 

 on the rocks, and popping into the water when approached. 



On the 1st of March we left the Soane, and struck inland 

 over a rough hilly country, covered with forest, fully 

 1000 feet below the top of the Kymore table-land, which 

 here recedes from the river and surrounds an undulating 

 plain, some ten miles either way, facing the south. The 

 roads, or rather pathways, were very bad, and quite impas- 

 sable for the carts without much engineering, cutting 

 through forest, smoothing down the banks of the water- 

 courses to be crossed, and clearing away the rocks as we 

 best might. We traversed the empty bed of a mountain 

 torrent, with perpendicular banks of alluvium 30 feet high, 

 and thence plunged into a dense forest. Our course was 



