join tree to
tree. Peppers, vines, and convolvulus twine themselves round the
trunks and branches, and hang in graceful pendants from the boughs.
And the trees, besides being hung with climbers, are also decked
with orchids and with foliaceous lichens and mosses. The wild
banana with its crown of glistening leaves is everywhere
conspicuous. Bamboos shoot up through the undergrowth to a
hundred feet or more in height. The fallen trees are richly clothed
with ferns typical of the hottest and dampest climates. And
dendrobiums and other orchids fasten on the branches.

* * *

At Kurseong there is another striking change, for the vegetation now
becomes more characteristic of the temperate zone. The spring here
vividly recalls the spring in England. Oaks of a noble species and
magnificent foliage are flowering and the birch bursting into leaf.
The violet, strawberry, maple, geranium, and bramble appear, and
mosses and lichens carpet the banks and roadsides. But the species
of these plants differ from their European prototypes, and are
accompanied at this elevation (and for 2,000 feet higher up) with
tree ferns forty feet in height, bananas, palms, figs, pepper, numbers
of epiphytal orchids, and similar genuine tropical genera.

From Kurseong we ascend through a magnificent forest of chestnut,
walnut, oaks, and laurels. Hooker, when he subsequently visited the
Khasia Hills in Assam, said that though the subtropical scenery on
the outer Himalaya was on a much more gigantic scale, it was not
comparable in beauty and luxuriance with the really tropical
vegetation induced by the hot, damp, and insular climate of those
perennially humid Khasia Hills. The forest of gigantic trees on the
Himalaya, many of them deciduous, appear from a distance as
masses of dark grey foliage, clothing mountains 10,000 feet high.
Whereas in the Khasia Hills the individual trees are smaller, more
varied in kind, of a brilliant green, and contrast with grey limestone
and red sandstone rocks. Still, even of the forest between Kurseong
and Darjiling, Hooker says that it is difficult to conceive a grander
mass of vegetation--the straight shafts of the timber trees shooting
aloft, some naked and clean with grey, pale, or brown bark; others
literally clothed for yards with a continuous garment of epiphytes
(air-plants), one mass of blossoms, especially the white orchids,
coelogynes, which, bloom in a profuse manner, whitening their
trunks like snow. Mor