order to frighten away whatever had alarmed them. We seized our guns, thinking that either elephants or a tiger must be close at hand, but, hearing nothing, we tied up the ponies again and went to sleep. As we could find no traces of any large animal.in the morning, we concluded that it was a false alarm; but as our ponies were of no use and were in great risk of being lamed by the sharp bamboo stubs and logs through which they had been dragged, we sent them back to wait for us at Laba.
Starting at about 6 a.m. we began soon to ascend the steep shoulder of the hill which led up to the top, and after an ascent of 1,600 feet or more, we came to a place where a long ridge runs down in a north¬ westerly direction towards Rhenok. This is the British frontier and is marked on the map by a pillar which, however, we could not find. .At this point, which is about 9,500 feet, Rhododendrons, Buddleia Colvilei and other Tonglo trees first appeared, and the large bamboo was replaced by the dwarf one which grows along the Singalela. The path from here was level for half a mile, following a deep trench among roots of trees, sometimes boggy, and then passing through extremely dense jungle of small stunted trees. Then we had a very steep climb up rocks covered with scrub for about 500 feet. This was the only part of the road that was impassable for ponies. But there would be no great difficulty in cutting a few zigzags, and, as the elephants had found their way up by diverging from the track, it must be easier than it looked. On this climb I found among the dense growth of bamboo some plants of a curious little white-flowered orchid, Goodyera sp., which I had never seen before, a dwarf Anæctochilus out of flower, and a green-flowered Habenaria with long spurs. At last, about 9 a.m., we reached the summit, but found no place from which a good view of the surrounding country could be obtained, as, though there were one or two very small openings, the whole top of the hill was covered with low forest. To the west and north we could see, over the deep valley of the Jaldhaka river, the ridge up which the Tibet road passes on to the open table-land above Lingtu; to the north a long forest-clad ridge seemed to run from where we were standing into the shoulder of the table-land. With a glass we could just make out the stone blockhouse which had been lately constructed near the head of the steep ascent to oppose the pro¬ gress of the Tibet Mission. To the south and west we could see but little owing to the cloud which had already begun to rise from the plains, but a long ridge runs south and east in a nearly parallel direction to that by which we had ascended, and in one or two places we made out what we thought to be groves of fir trees in the midst of the forest. As the existence of fir trees in this part of the country, and so near the outer edge of the hills, was unknown to botanists or to the officers of the Forest Department under whose control the whole of this country is nominally placed, I was anxious to make out what the species was. This I succeeded in doing on our descent by sending a man to cut off branches. It proved to be the Silver Fir, Abies Webbiana, which I had never seen elsewhere in Sikkim in a mixed forest of Oak, Chestnut and Magnolia; elsewhere it was always in a forest to itself apart from other trees. Sir Joseph Hooker has remarked on the absence of conifers on these wet outer ranges of Sikkim, and the lowest point where the Silver Fir grows on Singalela is
