in character as we
ascend--the most tropical trees and plants gradually disappearing, and more
and more flowers of the temperate zone coming into evidence. And
as we pierce farther into the mountains the climate becomes sensibly
drier and the forest lighter. There is still a heavy enough rainfall to
satisfy any ordinary plant or human being. But there is not the same
deluge that descends upon the outer ridges. So the forest is not so
dense. Frequently in its place social grasses clothe the
mountain-sides; and yellow violets, primulas, anemones, delphiniums,
currants, and saxifrages remind us of regions more akin to our own.

Now, too, we have reached the habitat of the rhododendrons, which
are so peculiarly a glory of Sikkim, and it is worth while to pause
and take special note of them. Out of the thirty species which are
found in Sikkim, all the most beautiful have been introduced
--chiefly by Sir Joseph Hooker--into England, and are grown in many
parks and gardens as well as at Kew. So English people can form
some idea of what the flowering trees of the Sikkim Forest are like.
But they must multiply by many times the few specimens they see in
an English park or hot-house, and must realise that as cowslips are
in a grassy meadow, so are these rhododendron trees in the Sikkim
Forest. Red, mauve, white, or yellow, they grow as great flowers
among the green giants of the forest and brighten it with colour. The
separate blossoms of a rhododendron tree cannot compare in beauty
with the individual orchid. There is in them neither the deep richness
of colour nor wonder of form nor sense of deeply matured
excellence. The claim of the rhododendron to favour is rather in the
collective quantity and mass of flowers so that by sheer weight of
numbers it can produce its effect of colour. In some of the upper
valleys the mountain slopes are clothed in a deep green mantle
glowing with bells of scarlet, white, or yellow.

Perhaps the most splendid of these rhododendrons is
_Rhododendron grande_ or _argenteum,_ which grows to a height
of from 30 to 40 feet, and has waxy bell-shaped flowers of a
yellowish-white suffused with pink, 2 to 3 inches long and about the
same across. The scarlet _R. arboreum,_ so general in the Himalaya,
is common in Sikkim and furnishes brilliant patches of colour in the
forest. And a magnificent species is _R. Auchlandii_ or
_Griffithianum,_ which has large white flowers tinged with pink, of
a firm fleshy