18 
NARRATIVE. 
servants and baggage, which had started from Lahore 
before me, and which I had passed on the road, began 
to turn Tip, and my men were loud in their com- 
plaints about the difficulty of the road. Here my sun 
thermometer rose in the afternoon, when placed in the 
sun, to 194° F. ; this may seem almost incredible, but 
in Tibet, at a much higher altitude, when the tem- 
perature falls at night below zero. Dr. Cayley has found 
the sun thermometer rise above 200° P. at mid- 
day. 
This extraordinary heat of the sun's rays is no 
doubt owing to the extraordinary clearness, as well as 
rarity, of the atmosphere in these elevated regions. 
On the 23rd May we marched fifteen miles, from Eam 
Su to Banihal, a village at the foot of the pass of the 
same name. There is a great deal of rice cultivation 
here, and all the hills are covered with grass, but 
there is not much forest, except along the streams. 
Walnut-trees planted about the villages attain a large 
size, and most of them have the mistletoe growing 
on them. Here I first noticed the beautiful 
Pheasant-Tailed Jacana, Hydro^liasianus Sinensis, 
which was very common in the flooded rice-fields. 
I sent a man to shoot some specimens, but on his 
return with half a dozen birds I found that, being a 
Mahomedan, he had thought it necessary to cut all 
their throats to make them " haldl,'' and he had not 
only thus disfigured the skins, but had also pulled 
out most of the long wing and tail feathers, and thus 
rendered the specimens utterly useless. This was 
the sort of man I had to break in for my work. On 
May 24th, for the first time since we had started, the 
sky was overcast and a thunderstorm was threatening 
