SIKKIM PLAIN AND PEAKS. 



497 



resplendent hues, and birds of gorgeous plumage. Many of these birds have notes 

 of exquisite melody. But the malaria engendered by the decomposition of the rank 

 vegetation and the dank soil renders the region one of the most insalubrious upon the 

 globe, and almost uninhabitable by man from the vernal to the autumnal equinox. 

 Here is the birthplace of the dreaded vomito, or yellow fever. 



Passing this fatal belt, after twenty leagues the traveler finds himself ascending 

 into a purer atmosphere. The vegetation changes at every league. One by one the 

 vanilla, the indigo plant, the sugar cane, and the plantain disappear ; until at the 

 hight of 4,000 feet the unchanging green of the rich foliage of the liquidamber indi- 

 cates that the traveler has reached the elevation where the clouds and mists settle in 

 their passage from the Gulf, and maintain a perpetual moisture. 



Here are the confines of the tierra templada, or temperate region, where the ever- 

 green oaks remind him of the forests of Central Europe. The features of the scenery 

 become imposing. The ascending road sweeps along the base of mighty mountains, 

 now snow-clad, but bearing traces of former volcanic fires. The flanks of the moun- 

 tains are rent with huge harancas or ravines, down whose steep sides he can look for 

 more than a thousand feet. Cactuses, euphorbia, dracsena, and a multitude of other 

 plants cling to the rocky walls; while at the bottom of the gorge, to which he might 

 apparently almost leap, stand huge laurels and fig-trees. Upward still, he passes 

 fields waving with yellow wheat and broad-leaved maize, with plantations of the agave, 

 from which the Mexicans prepare, as they did in the days of the Montezumas, their 

 national beverage of pulque. 



At an elevation of 8,000 feet, the forests of sombre pine announce that the tierra 

 fria, or " cold region," the last of the three great terraces, has been reached. Here 

 in the valley of Anahuac, yet at an elevation of 7,500 feet, rests the city of Mexico, 

 the famous capital of the Montezumas, with its shallow lakes, and surrounded by 

 elliptical plains, enclosed by frowning ridges of basaltic and porphyrite rocks. On 

 the south-eastern side rises the snow-crowned cone of Orizaba, whose ever blazing 

 summit, shining like a star through the darkness of night, gained for it its Aztec name 

 of Citlaltepetl, "the Mountain of the Star;" farther west rise Popocatepetl, Iztaci- 

 huatl, and Toluca, altogether forming a magnificent volcanic circuit, only equaled by 

 that which girdles the valley of Quito. If the traveler chooses to climb the sides of 

 these volcanoes, in a few days' journey he will have passed through every variety 

 of climate and every zone of production, from the fiercest tropical heat to the confines 

 of perpetual winter ; from the towering palm to the lichen which hardly lifts its head 

 above the sterile rock. 



Sikkim, on the southern side of the Himalayas, may be considered a vast sloping 

 plain, rising in a gradual ascent from the foot of the chain to the base of the peaks, the 

 highest on the globe. From the shores of the Bay of Bengal is a level plain of a 

 hundred miles in breadth to the foot of the Himelayas. Thence the land rises gently 

 7,000 feet in eighty miles. Here is the British sanitarium of Dorjiling, where the 

 European debilitated by the burning climate of the lowlands may breathe air as cool 

 and refreshing as those of his native land. Eighty miles further brings him 9,000 

 feet higher to the limits of perpetual snow. Then arise more steeply, 12,000 feet 

 higher, the lofty summits, rather than peaks, of the Himalayas, looking down upon 



