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66. On ascending the second range, or grand hills, all is changed: there is little deserving the name of beauty; all is grand and sublime, a mass of stupendous ravines on a gigantic scale. No distinct ranges, but an ocean of rugged mountains, some bare and rocky, some clothed with grass, and others covered by the finest trees, above which the white peaks of the Himaleyah, wrapped in their eternal snows, shoot up into the very heavens. It requires sometime to accustom the eye to understand the gigantic scale of these mountains: a gun is fired, and the sound scarce reaches a quarter of the distance to a peak from which the sportsman expects the echo: ridges that seem but a mile or two off are two or three day's journey distance, and on asking what are those blueish spots and ants on the opposite ridge, one discovers them to be the slated houses of a village and cattle grazing around. It is in such scenes as these that the nothingness of man is displayed. The very eagles soaring from their airy, and in a few minutes settling on a distant ridge which it would take a man a whole day's toil to attain, seem of a superior nature; and one is no longer surprised that an ignorant and simple race should in imagination have peopled almost every peak with a deity. On ascending one of these ridges from the warm valley below, the pure and bracing nature of the air inspires an elastic buoyancy of spirits that would indulge itself in almost childish glee and gambols; but the sunset presents the most peculiar view. As the day declines, the low vallies are first cast into deep shade, while the ridges are still smiling; these are gradually covered by shade, and the snowy peaks alone retain their tints of delicate rose colour; a few minutes more and these are changed to the most death-like paleness, exhibiting as strong a contrast as may be imagined in a human being in the height of health and beauty suddenly becoming a corpse.

AGRICULTURE.

67. The land is ploughed from once to seven or eight times: manure is used for sugar-cane, and sometimes for rice. The chief crop is the khureep or sâounee, of which the grain most sown is rice. The first sort is sown only in beds which can be irrigated, at different times, from the midde of March to the beginning of June. The calculation is three seers per bigga of the land into which it is to be transplanted: probably 150 seers per bigga are sown in the beds. It is transplanted from the beginning of June to the middle of August, to compensate for which trouble, that of weeding is saved, so that on the whole this sort is considered the most advantageous; but only choice portions of land are adapted for it. Nine men will transplant a puka bigga in a day. The second sort is sown in the end of March or beginning of April, in fields, like wheat. For this the land is ploughed on an average twice or three times. The third sort is sown in the beginning of July or as soon as the rains have well moistened the ground; large fields are chosen for it, in which embankments are made to retain the water a few inches deep in beds: one ploughing is sufficient. The seed is first soaked in water for three or four days, then rolled up in balls of the sôomaloo bush leaves, the fermentation of which produces considerable heat, (mangoes and plantains are often ripened in this way) for as much longer; when the grains begin to sprout, they are then thrown into the above mentioned beds; after about twenty days, the crop is harrowed, which renders it more abundant and destroys the grass.

68. Mundooa is the next in quantity, and is sown: one sort called doolia, in the end of May, the other called bhatrooa in the end of June; for it the land requires five to eight ploughings.

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69. The second sort of rice, and the mundooa, require weeding; the former twice. For this the owners of thirty or forty different fields join together, and making a long line weed each others fields in rotation, with music, composed of drums and a sort of hautboy to cheer them; the owner of each field in his turn pays the musicians. Almost every man is provided with an umbrella made of strips of bamboo and thatched with dry leaves.

70. The rubbee or sarce crop is inferior in quantity to the khureep; but every year more and more land is devoted to it, which is advantageous, as wheat contains much more nourishment than the khureep grains. For wheat and barley the land is ploughed from five to eight times; the other grains are sown in small quantities.

71. The following table shows the average produce of the different grains :

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Where there is convenience for irrigation, it is used for the rubbee occasionally; but in an ordinary season, what rain falls is sufficient. Manure would doubtless improve it greatly, but although in many villages they have abundance from their cattle, their apathy prevents their taking the trouble to make use of it. Oats have been sown by a few English gentlemen and succeed tolerably well. The wheat straw is not so long as that which grows in the plains.

72. In the khureep crop, juwar, bujra, mukkas, (Indian corn) copas (cotton,) and some others are sown in gardens in small quantities. A grain called tor, which in appearance is like the urrur of the plains, is sown in some places in the ground from which mundooa has been cut. One ploughing is sufficient: it is sown in the end of February or beginning of March, and reaped in the February following; a little sugar cane is also planted and sugar is made from it; the process is similar to the plains, but it does not appear to thrive well.

73. The" keel" cultivation should be described. It is made on the steep banks of ravines or hills, which are covered with underwood, and is practicable in the same place once in from six to twelve years. The underwood is cut in January and left to dry in the end of April it is burnt, and the ashes form the manure. The grain is then thrown on it, as the steepness of the ground would prevent any ploughing or harrowing. Mundooa, moog, marsu, and some others are the grains thus sown; sometimes two or more mixed together.

74. The most ordinary routine of crops, if the land is good, is rice ;-the second sort sown in the beginning of April, and cut in the end of August or beginning of September. Then wheat sown in the end of October or beginning of November, cut in April and May. Then til sown in the middle of June, cut in October or November, after which the land lies fallow till April, thus giving three crops in two years. Some rich land will yield two crops annually of rice and wheat. Some land is kept entirely for the rubbee, and others again for the khureep: this is more probably from the, in most villages, large quantity of land in proportion to the people. Usually in breaking up grass jungle land, mundooa is sown for the first crop, sometimes rice; in which case the ploughing is commenced some months before the sowings. If the land be broke up for the rubbee crop, wheat is the first grain sown.

75. The people have an admirable plan of fencing in their fields, which border on the high road, or a jungle inhabited by deer, with a hedge of dry prickly bushes; this prevents much loss, and all complaints and quarrels about trespasses of cattle (of which there is so much in the plains) and by saving them in a great measure the trouble of watching their crops, allows them to work as labourers between the sowing and cutting of the wheat. It is a pity they could not learn to make living hedges, for which the soomaloo bush to be found every where, is admirably suited, as it may be treated like the English quick-set and does not require watering: but although the English gentlemen at Dehra have set them the example, by showing practically how to do it, none have imitated it. It would not take more trouble the first year, about half as much in each of the second and third, and not a fourth as much in every succeeding year, as it requires annually to make the dry thorn hedges; and the trimming the living hedge would at the same time afford fire-wood.

CATTLE.

76. The cattle are perhaps rather smaller than in the plains, and of all colors,chiefly white. The average price of those of the poorer cultivators, is 20 Rs a pair; the richer have them worth 40 Rs; these are procured from the hill men, who buy the year old calves from the Doon people for 5 or 6 Rs- each, and taking great care of them, re-sell when full grown to those from whom they bought them, often for as much as 40 Rsa pair. This is an excellent mode of turning to use the surplus grain of the bill villages, for which from the want of roads there would otherwise be no market. On a rough estimate the cattle in the Doon may be 30,000; buffaloes 3,000; some of the people keep horses for their own riding. There are now about 100 carts in the Doon. Of goats, there are few, both plain and hill goats seem to thrive well; numbers of the former are brought up weekly to sell for food in the Sirmoor Battalion lines, as the Goorkas and hillmen are as fond of animal food as the English. There are also a few sheep: the plain

sheep thrive well enough, but those from the hills require great care at any time and then rarely outlive a rainy season."

WATER MILLS.

77. Some portions of grain are ground by hand, but by far the greater part by water mills, called guiât or punchukee. These are composed of two stones, and a wheel on which the water falls, all fixed horizontally. The stones are from 2 to 3 feet diameter; the under one, which is fixed, is a foot or a foot and half thick; the upper, which moves with the water wheel, is not much more than half that thickness. With a fall of water 10 or 12 feet, ten mun pakhee (a mun is 80 pounds avoirdupois) may be ground in a day or night. Some are even on a scale large enough to grind 20 or 25 muns. The price paid for grinding is usually two seers per mun. One boy is sufficient to attend a water mill. The cheapness of grinding by these mills is strongly exemplified at certain seasons when wheat is brought up from Suharunpoor to supply the Dehra market. The distance is forty-four miles, and notwithstanding the expense of carriage and the shop-keeper's profit, the flour at Dehra is sold at nearly the same price as it is at Suharunpoor, where the corn is ground by the hand.

MINES.

78. There are none; but the remains of some iron mines are extant, near the village of Kutter Putter, near which the Jumna enters the Doon. They never were of sufficient consequence to yeild a revenue to Government, but were occasionally worked at leisure hours by the people, who held the village: this has been deserted many years.

ROCKS.

79. Of the lower range the rocks are chiefly sand-stone; here and there large lumps, and even beds, of conglomerate or pudding stone, excessively hard. The second range is chiefly composed of clay-slate: a chalky sort of lime or whitening and many other descriptions are found there, but this require a geologist to describe properly. Gypsum is found in large lumps near the dripping rock. There are some particularities in the lower range of hills worth noting. The crest of the ridge is in some places composed of heaps of round smoothe stones, from the size of a man's fist to that of his head, imbedded in a substance that appears like a mixture of sand and mortar, so hard as to wear the best steel pick axes to the roots in a week in cutting through it. At the crest of the Kheree pass this composition is found in a large mass: it has been eut through almost perpendicularly, yet remains like a wall without falling for one or two seasons, after which the combined effects of exposure to the atmosphere and rains causes it to begin crumbling away. These rounded stones may be found imbedded sometimes singly, sometimes several together, deeply in the sand-stone rock, the formation of which appears to be continuing. The exterior portion of this sort of rock is generally tolerably hard, while the interior is soft; this, however, gradually hardens on being exposed to the atmosphere; the progress is fairly perceptible from year to year.

80.

The strata, of which the valley is composed, seems to contain a great variety of soils, as may be gathered from the following statement of different kinds met with in digging the well in the Government office ground at Dehra.

Particulars of the strata observed in sinking a well shaft about half a mile south of the town of Dehra.'

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

Ditto ditto, with pieces of conglomerate.

Ditto ditto, with enormous stones, some of them more than a yard cube.
Conglomerate on 3 sides the west, north and east, gravel 4th.

Sand and gravel, moist occasionally with pieces of conglomerate.

A bed of conglomerate all over the well.

Layers of sand and gravel, and of conglomerate, alternately, about six inches thick

Sand and gravel.

A bed of conglomerate, four inches thick, under it water but scanty.
Sand and clay.

Conglomerate, a bed or layer about four inches thick.

Sand and gravel, rather loose occasionally pieces of conglomerate, occa-
sionally solid blocks 160lbs. in weight.

Sand and gravel very moist; small pieces of conglomerate.
Conglomerate over half the well, under which water was found.
Red clay.

Sand and gravel, very moist, mixed with conglomerate, a considerable spring

found.

Blackish clay, with angular fragments of clay slate.

A layer of conglomerate.
Gravel.

MANUFACTURES.

81. There are but few manufactures in the Doon, and those very poor. Some blan, kets, cotton cloth, mats, and baskets and earthen pots comprise perhaps the whole. The potters understand the use of the wheel. Almost the only artificers are carpenters and blacksmiths, who can do little more than make articles of husbandry. In Dehra, of course, are one or two tolerable good workmen. There are few goldsmiths; only one brazier. The people make a very useful sort of cloak of dried leaves, pinned together with thorns, called a moonkee: these are used chiefly by the peasantry when employed in their agricultural pursuits. Umbrellas made of the same material, supported on a light cane frame, are sold for three pice each: a better sort of umbrella, covered with the birch bark, and ornamented with peafowl feathers, sells for from eight annas to two rupees. There are one or two blacksmiths attached to the bazar of the Sirmoor Battalion, who can make the kookree or crooked Nipal dagger, as well as the boojali, or

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