336 SIKKIM HIMALAYA. Chap. XIV. 



and paths wind everywhere over the gentle slopes, and 

 through the copsewoocl that has replaced the timber- 

 trees of a former period. Mendongs and chaits are 

 very numerous, some of great size ; and there are 

 also the ruins of two very large temples, near which are 

 some magnificent weeping cypresses, eighty feet high. 

 These fine trees are landmarks from all parts of the fiat ; 

 they form irregular cones of pale bright green, with 

 naked gnarled tops, the branches weep gracefully, but not 

 like the picture in Macartney's Embassy to China, whence 

 originated the famous willow-pattern of our crockery. 

 The ultimate branchlets are very slender and pendulous ; my 

 Lepcha boys used to make elegant chaplets of them, 

 binding the withes with scarlet worsted. The trunk is 

 quite erect, smooth, cylindrical, and pine-like ; it harbours 

 no moss, but air-plants, Orchids, and ferns, nestle on the 

 limbs, and pendulous lichens, like our beard-moss, wave 

 from the branches. 



In the evening I ascended to Doobdi. The path was 

 broad, and skilfully conducted up a very steep slope 

 covered with forest : the top, which is 6,470 feet above 

 the sea, and nearly 1000 above Yoksun, is a broad 

 partially paved platform, on which stand two temples, 

 surrounded by beautiful cypresses : one of these trees 

 (perhaps the oldest in Sikkim) measured sixteen and a 

 half feet in girth, at five feet from the ground, and was 

 apparently ninety feet high : it was not pyramidal, the top 

 branches being dead and broken, and the lower limbs 

 spreading ; they were loaded with masses of white- 

 flowered Ccelogynes, and Vacciniums. The younger trees 

 were pyramidal. 



I was received by a monk of low degree, who made 

 many apologies for the absence of his superior, who had 



