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Thick clouds of smoke pressed upon the plains, and the faint easterly wind wafted large flakes of grass charcoal sluggishly through the air. Vegetation was in great beauty, though past its winter prime. The tropical forest of India has two flowering seasons; one in summer, of the majority of plants; and the other in winter, of Acanthaceae, Bauhinia, Dillenia, Bombax, etc.
We walked to a stream, which flows at the base of the retiring sand-cliffs, and nourishes a dense and richly-varied jungle, producing many plants, as beautiful Acanthaceae, Indian horse-chesnut, loaded with white racemes of flowers, gay Convolvuli, laurels, terrestrial and parasitic Orchideae, Dillenia, casting its enormous flowers as big as two fists, pepper, figs, and, in strange association with these, a hawthorn, and the yellow-flowered Indian strawberry, which ascends 7,500 feet on the mountains, and Hodgsonia, a new Cucurbitaceous genus, clinging in profusion to the trees, and also found 5000 feet high on the mountains.
The white or lilac blossoms of the convolvuluslike Thunbergia, and other Acanthaceae were the predominant features of the shrubby vegetation, and very handsome. All around, the hills rise steeply five or six thousand feet, clothed in a dense deep-green dripping forest.
Laurels and wild nutmegs, with Henslowia, Itea, etc., were frequent in the forest, with the usual prevalence of parasites, mistleto, epiphytical Orchideae, AEshynanthus, ferns, mosses, and Lycopodia; and on the ground were Rubiaceae, Scitamineae, ferns, Acanthaceae, beautiful balsams, and herbaceous and shrubby nettles.
On the low jungly hills the same plants appear, with a few figs, bamboo in great abundance, several handsome Acanthaceae; a few Asclepiadeae climbing up the bushes; and the Cowage plant, now with over-ripe pods, by shaking which, in passing, there often falls such a shower of its irritating microscopic hairs, as to make the skin tingle for an hour.
The skirts of the forest were adorned with numerous jungle flowers, rice crops, blue Acanthaceae and Pavetta, wild cherry-trees covered with scarlet blossoms, and trees of the purple and lilac Bauhinia; while Thunbergia, Convolvulus, and other climbers, hung in graceful festoons from the boughs, and on the dry micaceous rocks the Luculia gratissima, one of our common hot-house ornaments, grew in profusion, its gorgeous heads of blossoms scenting the air.
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