February 2, 1850.—­Halted at Mahomdee.  The spring crops around the town are very fine, and the place is considered to be very healthy.  There is, however, some peculiarity in the soil, opposed to the growth of the poppy.  The cultivators tell me that they have often tried it; that it is stunted in growth, whatever care be taken of it, and yields but little juice, and that of bad quality, though it attains perfection in the Shahabad and other districts around.  The doomuteea soil is here esteemed better than the muteear, though it requires more labour in the tillage.  It is said that mote and mash, two pulses, do not thrive in the muteear soil so well as in the doomuteea.

February 3, 1850.—­Poknapoor, eight miles.  We crossed the Goomtee about midway, over a bridge of boats that had been prepared for us.  The boats came up the river thus far for timber, and were detained for the occasion.  The stream is here narrow, and said to flow from a basin (the phoola talao) in the Tarae forest, some fifty miles to the north, at Madhoo Tanda.  There is some tillage on the verge of the stream on the other side; but from the river to our tents, four miles, there is none.  The country is level and well studded with groves and fine single trees, bur, peepul, mhowa, mango, &c., but covered with rank grass.

Near the river is a belt of the sakhoo and other forest trees, with underwood, in which tigers lodge and prey upon the deer, which cover the grass plain, and frequently upon the bullocks, which are grazed upon it in great numbers.  Several bullocks have been killed and eaten by them within the last few days; and an old fakeer, who has for some months taken up his lodging on this side the river under a peepul-tree, in a straw hut just big enough to hold him, told us that he frequently saw them come down to drink in the stream near his lodging.  We saw a great many deer in passing, but no tigers.  The soil near the river is sandy, and the ground uneven, but still cultivable; and on this side of the sandy belt it is all level and of the best kind of doomuteea.  Our tents are in a fine grove of mango-trees, in the midst of a waste, but level and extensive, plain of this soil, not a rood of which is unfit for the plough or incapable of yielding crops of the finest quality.  It is capable of being made, in two or three years, a beautiful garden.

The single trees, which are scattered all over it, have been shorn of their leaves and small branches by the cowherds for their cattle, but they would all soon clothe themselves again under protection.  The groves are sufficiently numerous to furnish sites for the villages and hamlets required.  All the large sakhoo-trees have been cut down and taken away on the ground we have come over, which is too near the river for them to be permitted to attain full size.  Not an acre or a foot of the land is oosur, or unfit for tillage.  Poknapoor is in the estate of Etowa, which forms part of the pergunnah of Peepareea,