elephant could travel.  Past bush and brake, down precipitous ravine, over the stones, through the thorny scrub, dashing down a steep bank here, plunging madly through a deep stream there, we shuffled along.  We must have been going fully seven miles an hour.  The pestle-shaped hammer is called a lohath, and most unmercifully were they wielded.  We were jostled and jolted, till every bone ached again.  Clouds of dust were driven before our reeling waving line.  How the Nepaulese shouted and capered.  We were all mad with excitement.  I shouted with the rest.  The fat little Major kicked his heels against the sides of his elephant, as if he were spurring a Derby winner to victory.  Our usually sedate captain yelled—­actually yelled!—­in an agony of excitement, and tried to execute a war dance of his own on the floor of his howdah.  Our guns rattled, the chains clanked and jangled, the howdahs rocked and pitched from side to side.  We made a desperate effort.  The poor elephants made a gallant race of it.  The foot men perspired and swore, but it was not to be.  Our striped friend had the best of the start, and we gained not an inch upon him.  To our unspeakable mortification, he reached the dense cover on ahead, where we might as well have sought for a needle in a haystack.  Never, however, shall I forget that mad headlong scramble.  Fancy an elephant steeple-chase.  Reader, it was sublime; but we ached for it next day.

The old Major and his fleet racing elephants now left us, and our jaded beasts took us slowly back in the direction of our camp.  It was a fine wild view on which we were now gazing.  Behind us the dark gloomy impenetrable morung, the home of ever-abiding fever and ague.  Behind that the countless multitude of hills, swelling here and receding there, a jumbled heap of mighty peaks and fretted pinnacles, with their glistening sides and dark shadowless ravines, their mighty scaurs and their abrupt serrated edges showing out clearly and boldly defined against the evening sky.  Far to the right, the shining river—­a riband of burnished steel, for its waters were a deep steely blue—­rolled its swift flood along amid shining sand-banks.  In front, the vast undulating plain, with grove, and rill, and smoking hamlet, stretched at our feet in a lovely panorama of blended and harmonious colour.  We were now high up above the plain, and the scene was one of the finest I have ever witnessed in India.  The wind had gone down, and the oblique rays of the sun lit up the whole vast panorama with a lurid light, which was heightened in effect by the dust-laden atmosphere, and the volumes of smoke from the now distant fires, hedging in the far horizon with curtains of threatening grandeur and gloom.  That far away canopy of dust and smoke formed a wonderful contrast to the shining snow-capped hills behind.  Altogether it was a day to be remembered.  I have seen no such strange and unearthly combination of shade and colour in any landscape before or since.