Oriental Scenery/Part 4/Plate 20
No. XX.
VIEW OF THE RAMGUNGA.
This view is taken in the vicinity, and between the villages of Buddell and Bilcate, from a most delightful spot insulated by the Ramgunga, whose clear and active streams communicated both freshness and beauty to the scene. The author would have had much pleasure in embodying the charms of the evening scenery of that enchanting, if not enchanted island, a task which unhappily is not within the reach of his art, being the result of various concurring circumstances, and of undefinable and evanescent effects that the pencil cannot trace. The mild temperature of the atmosphere, opposed to the heats of the preceding hours, inflamed by fatigue; the murmuring of the passing streams; the majestic grandeur of the mountains, increased by the visionary effect of the twilight; and to these must be added a circumstance, if possible, still further out of the reach of imitative art, and this was the myriad swarms of the fire-flies, that seemed to fill the lower region of the air, and which, uniting their numerous rays of phosphoric light, illuminated every object, and diffused a magical radiance equally beautiful and surprising; it seemed, in truth, to be a land of romance, and the proper residence of those fanciful beings, the fairies and genii, that appear so often in Asiatic tales. But the delicious sensations produced by causes of such a nature, can, by no effect of genius, be re-excited; they must be seen and felt to be conceived; purchased by toil and privations of every kind; and, after all, they must be met with, and not sought; for pleasures that delight by surprise, vanish before anticipation.
From the villages of Buddell and Bilcate the road to Serinagur continues up the ridge of the mountain that appears in the middle of this view, and leads, by a laborious ascent of eight or ten miles, to the village of Natan; a labour which few, perhaps, except those who have cultivated the pleasures of art, can undergo without complaint or relaxation: but the infinite variety with which the artist's eye is every where regaled in these vast assemblages of picturesque, grand, and magnificent forms, more than counterbalance the toils of his pursuit.
View of the Ramgunga.