1846.] and Boorun Passes over the Himalaya. 121 



Water boils here at 198, which would give about 8,000 feet elevation. 

 The villagers are of dark complexion. They keep numerous bee-hives, 

 as usual located in the walls of the houses, which are very substantial, 

 of stone and timber, roofed with thick slabs of mica- slate, 



September 24th. — To Kala Panee, ten miles or perhaps more, in five 

 hours and fifty minutes, of which the minutes were spent at Doodoo. 

 The path falls in about 600 feet to the Roopin, passes it by a sanga, and 

 continues for about a mile on the right bank through grass ; then crosses 

 a torrent from the Changsheel Pass, and finally quits the Roopin river 

 and glen by an ascent of 1,200 feet up the steep grassy mountain to 

 Doodoo or Doodrah, a considerable village, reckoned 8,732 feet above 

 the sea, and the chief place of the district called Ruwain in NW. 

 Gurhwal; the locality of which, Prinsep in his account of the Ghoor- 

 ka war declared himself unable to assign. The Iris nepalensis is 

 plentiful here on the damp shady ground, as Iris decora is on the 

 sunny meadows below. The Mohroo oak (Quercus dilatata) grows at 

 Doodoo in great beauty and perfection : one specimen by the wayside 

 measured nineteen feet round at five from the ground, and possesses so 

 superb and verdant a head, that it would have been deified in the time 

 of the Druids. It does not appear that any superstition attaches in 

 these mountains to the oak similar to those which made the Greeks 

 people it with dryads and oracular demons, and the Celts to regard it as 

 the habitation of Darnaway, their Jupiter Tonans, as apostrophized in 

 masonic strains by one Vettius Valens Antiochenus ; 



' By the bright circle of the golden sun, 

 By the bright courses of the errant moon, 

 By the dread potency of every star, 

 In the mysterious Zodiac's burning girth- 

 By each and all of these supernal signs, 

 We do adjure thee, with this trusty blade, 

 To guard yon central oak, whose holy stem 

 Involves the spirit of high Taranis : — 

 Be this thy charge.' 



Our mountaineers are too much accustomed to lop oak branches and 

 leaves for their cattle to believe there can be any thing very sacred 

 about it. 



At Doodoo, the path turns to the right, and after rising for a mile or 

 more through an open cultivated country, enters the forest, in which it 



