was not room for the noosers to go in on foot, and the constant movement of the crowd surging round and round made it very difficult to get nooses on their feet from the outside. This work requires experience, which the Nepalese had not had. But though all the mahouts had spears with which to prick the trunks of any wild ones which might attempt to touch them, I never saw one offer to do so. Many of the elephants now seemed very tired and thirsty, as they well might be after such days and nights as they had endured, and we never thought that the young ones would have survived. But though it took three days before the whole thirty-three elephants were finally tied up and pulled out of the enclosure, not one was seriously hurt, though several of the oldest were released as not worth the trouble of training.
Ten days later we arrived at Raxaul, a frontier station a little to the east of Biknathori, where the Resident has a bungalow, and where he had made arrangements for our journey to Khatmandu. The first stage, of thirty miles through the level plain of the Terai, we made in dhoolies carried by bearers, and at daylight we found ourselves in the sal forest near Chuna, where the outer range of hills begins. Here we breakfasted and went on horseback over a low rocky sandstone range in which Pinus longifolia is a notable tree. Passing through a narrow gorge where in many places the dry river-bed is the only road, sometimes impassable in the rainy season, we crossed an open valley where the cotton trees, Bombax malabaricum , were of great size. We then followed the banks of a river along a road practicable for bullock-carts and wooded with tropical trees, but not nearly so luxuriant or so varied in its vegetation as a valley in Sikkim of similar elevation would have been. The large white flowers of a shrubby climber called Beaumontia were at this season the only striking ones I saw, and along the road there were but few birds to be seen as numbers of bullock-carts were constantly passing.
In the evening we reached Bhimpedi, a large village at the foot of a steep range of mountains, over which the path is quite impracticable except for coolies, and here we were met by a party of men with dhoolies and torches, who surpassed all the bearers I have ever seen in their power. For to carry a man of my weight in the dark up a winding path on a gradient of thirty to forty degrees and covered with rolling stones was a task I should hardly have thought possible till I saw it done, and they only stopped for a few moments to relieve each other on an ascent of over 2,000 feet. Near the top of this mountain Colonel Manners Smith has another bungalow at Sisagarhi, between 5,000 and 6,000 feet above the sea, where we found dinner and beds ready.
Next morning we had a fine view over the outer hills, and found rhodo¬ dendrons in flower and evergreen oaks all round us on the dry grassy hillsides, reminding me far more of Chakrata in the North-West Himalaya than of anything in Sikkim. Next morning we went on in the same dhoolies, and after crossing the ridge at about 7,000 feet descended by a very steep rocky path through a fairly thick forest on the north side, where, though epiphytes, climbing plants and ferns were numerous, the whole aspect of the vegetation was utterly unlike the forest of Sikkim, At the foot of this mountain we found ponies kindly sent by the Maharajah; we turned
