We crossed the Ratong (twenty yards broad) by a cane bridge, suspended between two rocks of green chlorite, full of veins of granite. Ascending, we passed the village of Kameti on a spur, on the face of which were strewed some enormous detached blocks of white and pink stratified quartz: the rocks _in situ_ were all chlorite schist.
Looking across the valley to the flank of Mainom, the disposition of the ridges and ravines on its sides was very evident; many of the latter, throughout their westerly course, from their commencement at 10,000 feet, to their debouchure in the Great Rungeet at 2000, had a bluff, cliffy, northern flank, and a sloping southern one. The dip of the surfaces is, therefore, north-west, the exposure consequently of the villages which occupy terraces on the south flanks of the lateral valleys. The Tassiding spur presented exactly the same arrangement of its ravines, and the dip of the rocks being north-west, it follows that the planes of the sloping surfaces coincide in direction (though not in amount of inclination) with that of the dip of the subjacent strata, which is anything but a usual phenomenon in Sikkim.
The ascent to Pemiongchi continued very steep, through woods of oaks, chesnuts, and magnolias, but no tree-fern, palms, _Pothos,_ or plantain, which abound at this elevation on the moister outer ranges of Sikkim. The temple (elev. 7,083 feet) is large, eighty feet long, and in excellent order, built upon the lofty terminal point of the great east and west spur that divides the Kulhait from the Ratong and Rungbee rivers; and the great Changachelling temple and monastery stand on another eminence of the same ridge, two miles further west.
The view of the snowy range from this temple is one of the finest in Sikkim; the eye surveying at one glance the vegetation of the Tropics and the Poles. Deep in the valleys the river-beds are but 3000 feet above the sea, and are choked with fig-trees, plantains, and palms; to these succeed laurels and magnolias, and higher up still, oaks, chesnuts, birches, etc.; there is, however, no marked line between the limits of these two last forests, which form the prevailing arboreous vegetation between 4000 and 10,000 feet, and give a lurid line to the mountains. Pine forests succeed for 2000 feet higher, when they give place to a skirting of rhododendron and berberry. Among these appear black naked rocks, rising up in cliffs, between which are gulleys, down which the snow now (on the 1st January) descended to 12,000 feet. The mountain flanks are much more steep and rocky than those at similar heights on the outer ranges, and cataracts are very numerous, and of considerable height, though small in volume.