It was very late before I arrived at Pacheem bungalow, the most sinister-looking rest-house I ever saw, stuck on a little cleared spur of the mountain, surrounded by dark forests, overhanging a profound valley, and enveloped in mists and rain, and hideous in architecture, being a miserable attempt to unite the Swiss cottage with the suburban gothic; it combined a maximum of discomfort with a minimum of good looks or good cheer. I was some time in finding the dirty housekeeper, in an outhouse hard by, and then in waking him. As he led me up the crazy verandah, and into a broad ghostly room, without glass in the windows, or fire, or any one comfort, my mind recurred to the stories told of the horrors of the Hartz forest, and of the benighted traveller’s situation therein. Cold sluggish beetles hung to the damp walls,—and these I immediately secured. After due exertions and perseverance with the damp wood, a fire smoked lustily, and, by cajoling the gnome of a housekeeper, I procured the usual roast fowl and potatos, with the accustomed sauce of a strong smoky and singed flavour.[30]
[30] Since writing the above a comfortable house has been erected at Senadah, the name now given to what was called Pacheem Bungalow.
Pacheem stands at an elevation of nearly 7300 feet, and as I walked out on the following morning I met with English looking plants in abundance, but was too early in the season to get aught but the foliage of most. _Chryosplenium,_ violet, _Lobelia,_ a small geranium, strawberry, five or six kinds of bramble, _Arum, Paris, Convallaria, Stellaria, Rubia, Vaccinium,_ and various _Gnaphalia._ Of small bushes, cornels, honeysuckles, and the ivy tribe predominated, with _Symplocos_ and _Skimmia, Eurya,_ bushy brambles, having simple or compound green or beautifully silky foliage; _Hypericum,_ Berberry, Hydrangea, Wormwood, _Adamia cyanea, Viburnum,_ Elder, dwarf bamboo, etc.
The climbing plants were still _Panax_ or _Aralia, Kadsura, Saurauja, Hydrangea,_ Vines, _Smilax, Ampelopsis, Polygona,_ and, most beautiful of all, _Stauntonia,_ with pendulous racemes of lilac blossoms. Epiphytes were rarer, still I found white and purple _Cæloynes,_ and other Orchids, and a most noble white Rhododendron, whose truly enormous and delicious lemon-scented blossoms strewed the ground. The trees were one half oaks, one quarter Magnolias, and nearly another quarter laurels, amongst which grew Himalayan kinds of birch, alder, maple, holly, bird-cherry, common cherry, and apple. The absence of _Leguminosæ_ was most remarkable, and the most prominent botanical feature in the vegetation of this region: it is too high for the tropical tribes of the warmer elevations, too low for the Alpines, and probably too moist for those of temperate regions; cool, equable, humid climates being generally unfavourable to that order. Clematis was rare, and other _Ranunculaceæ_ still more so. _Cruciferæ_ were absent, and, what was still more remarkable, I found very few native species of grasses. Both _Poa annua_ and white Dutch clover flourished where accidentally disseminated, but only in artificially cleared spots. Of ferns I collected about sixty species, chiefly of temperate genera. The supremacy of this temperate region consists in the infinite number of forest trees, in the absence (in the usual proportion, at any rate) of such common orders as _Compositæ, Leguminosæ, Cruciferæ,_ and _Ranunculaceæ,_ and of Grasses amongst Monocotyledons, and in the predominance of the rarer and more local families, as those of Rhododendron, Camellia, Magnolia, Ivy, Cornel, Honeysuckle, Hydrangea, Begonia, and Epiphytic orchids.