Himalayan Journals Volume 2

Angebote / Angebote:

Excerpt: ...(rattan) and various flowering plants climbed. The rock at Terrya is a nummulitic limestone, worn into extensive caverns. This formation is said to extend along the southern flank of the Khasia, Garrow, and Jyntea mountains, and to be associated with sandstone and coal: it is extensively quarried in many places, several thousand tons being annually shipped for Calcutta and Dacca. It is succeeded by a horizontally stratified sandstone, which is continued up to 4000 feet, where it is overlain by coal-beds and then by limestone again. The sub-tropical scenery of the lower and outer Sikkim Himalaya, though on a much more gigantic scale, is not comparable in beauty and luxuriance with the really tropical vegetation induced by the hot, damp, and insular climate of these perennially humid mountains. At the Himalaya forests of gigantic trees, many of them deciduous, appear from a distance as masses of dark gray foliage, clothing mountains 10, 000 feet high: here the individual trees are smaller, more varied in kind, of a brilliant green, and contrast with gray limestone and red sandstone rocks and silvery cataracts. Palms are more numerous here, There are upwards of twenty kinds of Palm in this district, including Chamaerops, three species of Areca, two of Wallichia, Arenga, Caryota, three of Phoenix, Plectocomia, Licuala, and many species of Calamus. Besides these there are several kinds of Pandanus, and the Cycas pectinata. the cultivated Areca (betel-nut) especially, raising its graceful stem and feathery crown, "like an arrow shot down from heaven, " in luxuriance and beauty above the verdant slopes. This difference is at once expressed to the Indian botanist by defining the Khasia flora as of Malayan character, by which is meant the prevalence of brilliant glossy-leaved evergreen tribes of trees (as Euphorbiaceae and Urticeae), especially figs, which abound in the hot gulleys, where the property of their roots, which inosculate and form natural grafts, ...