I made Rotas Palace 1,490 feet above the sea, so that this table-land is here only fifty feet higher than that I had crossed on the grand trunk road, before descending at the Dunwah pass. Its mean temperature is of course considerably (4°) below that of the valley, but though so cool, agues prevail after the rains. The extremes of temperature are less marked than in the valley, which becomes excessively heated, and where hot winds sometimes last for a week, blowing in furious gusts.
The climate of the whole neighbourhood has of late changed materially; and the fall of rain has much diminished, consequent on felling the forests; even within six years the hail-storms have been far less frequent and violent. The air on the hills is highly electrical, owing, no doubt, to the dryness of the atmosphere, and to this the frequent recurrence of hail-storms may be due.
The zoology of these regions is tolerably copious, but little is known of the natural history of a great part of the plateau; a native tribe, prone to human sacrifices, is talked of. Tigers are common, and bears are numerous; they have, besides, the leopard, panther, viverine cat, and civet; and of the dog tribe the pariah, jackal, fox, and wild dog, called Koa. Deer are very numerous, of six or seven kinds. A small alligator inhabits the hill streams, said to be a very different animal from either of the Soane species.
During our descent we examined several instances of ripple-mark (fossil waves’ footsteps) in the sandstone; they resembled the fluting of the _Sigillaria_ stems, in the coal-measures, and occurring as they did here, in sandstone, a little above great beds of limestone, had been taken for such, and as indications of coal.
On the following day we visited Rajghat, a steep ghat or pass leading up the cliff to Rotas Palace, a little higher up the river. We took the elephants to the mouth of the glen, where we dismounted, and whence we followed a stream abounding in small fish and aquatic insects (_Dytisci_ and _Gyrini_), through a close jungle, to the foot of the cliffs, where there are indications of coal. The woods were full of monkeys, and amongst other plants I observed _Murraya exotica,_ but it was scarce. Though the jungle was so dense, the woods were very dry, containing no Palm, _Adroideæ,_ Peppers, _Orchideæ_ or Ferns. Here, at the foot of the red cliffs, which towered imposingly above, as seen through the tree tops, are several small seams of coaly matter in the sandstone, with abundance of pyrites, sulphur, and copious efflorescences of salts of iron; but no coal. The springs from the cliffs above are charged with lime, of which enormous tuff beds are deposited on the sandstone, full of impressions of the leaves and stems of the surrounding trees, which, however, I found it very difficult to recognize, and could not help contrasting this circumstance with the fact that geologists, unskilled in botany, see no difficulty in referring equally imperfect remains of extinct vegetables to existing genera. In some parts of their course the streams take up quantities of the efflorescence, which they scatter over the sandstones in a singular manner.