Mountain plants were only occasional, and mostly such as at Simla descend on the dry grassy slopes into the valleys: a berberry and bramble (_Rubus flavus_), _Plectranthus rugosus_, which is a grey and dusty-looking shrub, _Melissa umbrosa_, _Micromeria biflora_, a little _Geranium_, _Ajuga parviflora_, a _Galium_, _Senecio_, _Aplotaxis candicans_, and one or two _Umbelliferæ_. They did not, however, amount to a twentieth part of the whole vegetation, and the aspect of the flora was quite subtropical. A little _Eriophorum_, which is everywhere common in arid places at the base of the Himalaya, from Assam to the Indus, was frequent in the crevices of the rocks. Ferns were very scarce, only two or three being observed.
The town of Rampur is a considerable place, on a small level tract of ground, about a hundred feet above the bed of the river Sutlej, which it overhangs. The houses are substantially built, in the form of a square, with an open space in the centre; they are mostly one-storied, and have steeply-sloping slated roofs. The town has a good deal of trade with Tibet, principally in shawl wool, and is the seat of a small manufacture of white soft shawl-cloths. The river is here crossed by a rope suspension-bridge, of a kind very common in the lower valleys, which has often been described. It consists of nine stout ropes, which are stretched from one side of the river to the other. The width of the Sutlej at the bridge, according to Captain Gerard, by whom it was measured, is 211 feet.
During our stay at Rampur, Major Cunningham directed my attention to the alteration of the level of the river at different periods of the day, from the variable amount of solar action on the snows by which it is fed. This effect he had noticed on his former visit to the mountains, and we had frequent opportunities of observing it during our journey. At Rampur the diurnal variation was not less than three or four feet, the maximum being, I believe, during the night or early in the morning. In the immediate vicinity of snow, the streams are highest in the afternoon, but as the distance increases the period of greatest height becomes by degrees later and later.
Except on our two first days' journey, we had been extremely fortunate in weather since leaving Simla. The day of the 8th was very cloudy and oppressive, and the 9th, on which we remained stationary at Rampur to make arrangements with the Rajah for our further progress through Basehir and Kunawar, was rainy throughout. The rain, however, was light, and did not prevent the Rajah from visiting us in the afternoon, impelled, I suppose, by a desire to see our apparatus and arrangements for travelling. We were lodged in an excellent upper-roomed house of his, overhanging the Sutlej, and not far from his own residence, which lies at the east end of the town, and externally is quite without beauty, presenting to view nothing but a mass of dead walls. The Rajah seldom remains during the hot season at Rampur, as he has a second residence at Serahan, twenty miles up the river, and 7000 feet above the level of the sea, in which he usually spends the summer, though during 1847, for some reason or other, he remained during the greater part of the year at Rampur.