Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/273

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IN INDIA.
253

during the winter, and to avoid these many visitors proceed to Almorah or the plains.

The scenery on the first half of the ascent is not very interesting, but towards the top it becomes very grand, the perpendicular cliffs of Aya-patta being the chief features in the landscape.

The principal attraction of the station is the Lake or Thai; a sheet of water darkly, deeply blue, about a mile long, and varying from a a quarter to half a mile in breadth; fringed with the broad leaved lotus, overhung with luxuriant forest trees, and walled in by ranges of mountains rising by moderate slopes one or two thousand feet above the lake. The greater number of the houses are built low down, near the lake, but numbers are perched along the brows of the hills, and many on the summits of the ridges. There is an excellent road all round the lake, and numerous rides in all directions, even to the top of Cheenur, about 9,000 feet high. The views from the top of Cheenur are exceedingly grand; towards the south the plains of Rohdcund appear like a rich carpet spread out for nature herself to repose upon; the towns and the fields, the woods and waters, diminished to spots, pourtrayed like patterns, melting away in aerial perspective till the landscape is lost in the hazy horizon one hundred miles distant.