Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/280

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260
ADVICE TO OFFICERS

variety of the sublime and beautiful during one single day. At sunrise the Dhoon is seen, expanded 3 or 4,000 feet below, like a boundless meadow, dappled with forests and fertile fields, cut into sections by numerous rivulets, with every tree and every house distinctly marked. Beyond it appears the Sewalic range, the cemetery of an antediluvian world, exhumed by Cauteley and Falconer, those eminent geologists, who have reversed the order of the march of intellect, and directed it to an era anterior to man's existence, when the mammoth and the mastodon were the monarchs of the world, and the solid rock that now encases their bones, was a plastic mass of mud. Beyond the Sewalic range the fertile plains of Upper India may be traced to an immense distance; the Jumna filled by the melted snow, and the periodical rains, is seen on the right, meandering like a rivulet, or overflowing its banks like a sea. On the left is seen the most magnificent monument of the Company's dominions, the great Ganges canal, the mighty river being turned from its bed, and measured out in streams to fertilize the provinces through which it runs along a course of 7 or 800 miles, with a breadth of 170 feet, a depth of 10 feet and fit also for navigation.

About seven in the morning the dews of the night ascend and congregate in clouds, expanding