Chapter VIII: My First Sight of the Himalayas

When I changed at Siliguri on to the Darjeeling Himalaya Railway, the moon hung high overhead in the morning sky, and the mountains slowly appeared out of the warm rosy mists of the lower air. I was still crossing the lowlands, yellow reaches of paddy stubble dotted with small white storks, wide watercourses and tall clumps of graceful bamboos looking nearly as yellow as the dry paddy stalks.

Then the train entered a belt of dense jungle, a forest track of teak and other large trees. At Sookua Station, bougainvillias and a creeper loaded with orange-coloured blossoms made gay colour. The train jolted and wriggled up the slopes in zigzag curves; creepers hung from tall trees like great falling cascades of little golden leaves. The grade was very steep, and in an hour I was looking back on the plains and down upon the forest-clad lower slopes, over which a few wreaths of mist floated like belated spirits that have outstayed cockcrow and move forlorn in the unwonted day.

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Suddenly past Tindaria, 2800 feet up, between the trees overhead, appeared a tea-plantation with its little green bushes in neat serried rows. The forest had now given place to smaller trees, and here and there among the great sweeps of hill were grey and dun patches, bare except for sparse dry herbage and small fern growth. The large leaves of plantains were still visible now and again, and here and there the white hanging trumpets of the poisonous datura. Bare rock became more frequent, and screw-pines appeared among the trees and peach trees flushed with pink blossom. Towards ten o'clock the heat haze gathered over the lower slopes, and the plain with its shining watercourses disappeared in a veil of mist.

Near Kurseong, tree-ferns bordered the line; and almost immediately beyond this station came the first view of Himalayan snows. Only for the next quarter of an hour's run, however, were the white peaks visible. The train then curled along the sides of the mighty hill-slopes, and at an elevation of 6000 feet there were plenty of big trees again with masses of parasite mistletoe on their branches and tree-ferns in their shadows; the leaves of the all-glorious forest glittered in the sunlight like jewels--how Constable would have revelled in them!

All the men at these latter stopping-places were short and thick-set, and the women's ornaments {133} were either gold or gilded and no longer silver like those of so many of the people in the plains. At Ghoom, 7407 feet up, white votive strips of linen with prayers upon them fluttered from sticks upright on all the roofs. At that station a little bearded dwarf came begging--a dwarf with a long pigtail, successor to an old woman who had been well known as the "Witch of Ghoom."

"Woodlands," the hotel at Darjeeling, was the most comfortable I found anywhere in India, and Mr Righi, the young Italian manager, kindly put his private servant, Teenduk, a Thibetan, entirely at my service as guide during my stay.

Teenduk, who told me that Mr Righi 'catched' him five years ago, had under his fur cap one of the most good-tempered faces I ever saw, full of quiet humour and readiness to respond to the faintest smile. He was cleaner than most of the native people at Darjeeling, and certainly washed his face sometimes. This is a thing which Thibetans rarely do, and some people declare that they never take off any clothes, putting on a new garment over the old when that is much worn. The dirt, together with a mixture of pig's blood which the women apply to their faces, gives them a mottled appearance, with black spots over a mahogany ground; but their sense of fun, united to a slow and laconic manner, makes them irresistibly {134} lovable, and indicates that although cleanliness may be next to godliness, humour is the quality which man has added to make mortality endurable.

The high snow peaks of Kinchinjunga and the neighbouring mountains are between forty and fifty miles away from Darjeeling, and seem to hang in the sky as if too beautiful to be altogether of our world. The vast distance and the appearance of sudden leap to such supreme heights, help to give an unreal, mysterious and almost visionary grandeur, which is further increased at this time of year by the fact of their being only occasionally visible.

It was a jolly six-mile ride in the early morning for the sunrise views from the top of Tiger Hill--bright moonlight at starting, with the shadows sharp and clear. I could still see them faintly on the snow as I dismounted at the top just before dawn, and set myself with cold fingers to paint the strange beauty of the sunrise upon the snows. Gradually the cold light of the moon changed to a warm soft glow of golden amber, and that again to rose. The sharp outlines of Kinchinjunga were clear from the first, and presently, much farther to the west, appeared the three humpy peaks of Everest, 120 miles away. Little Righi has been a good way toward the summit of Kinchinjunga. He was one of the five members of the expedition {135} of 1905, when the loss of Lieutenant Pache with three coolies, at a height of 22,000 feet, caused the others to give up the attempt.

As a showman, Righi was well equipped, having that understanding of individual needs so gratifying to the tourist. To the top of Tiger Hill had also ridden for that sunrise a party of Americans, whose one purpose was to be able to say they had seen Mount Everest. Their impatience was considerable, and after arguing among themselves as to which was the summit in question, one lady appealed to Righi to support her selection. "Oh, yes," said he, "that's Everest," and they were well content. "We don't often see it, but I like them to be satisfied," he explained to me when the mountain, by good luck, really appeared later on in another part of the horizon.

There is no regiment quartered at Darjeeling, but the planters of the district make Company A of the Northern Bengal Mounted Rifles (who possessed a Maxim gun before any regular troops in India); and one morning I rode out to the Lebong parade-ground, above the Runjeet valley, to see a muster. Tea-planters and other business-men thoroughly enjoyed the occasion, and there was a spirited display of tent-pegging with swords instead of lances.

Darjeeling is about 7000 feet high on a ridge above the Runjeet River, which reaches the {136} Ganges via another river called the Teester: and one day I rode with Righi 12 miles down to the Runjeet, and having previously obtained the necessary Government permit we crossed by a suspension bridge to a village in Independent Sikkim, where we were refreshed with native beer made from Marwa, a kind of millet seed and sucked through a hollow reed from a long-shaped vessel made of a section of bamboo.

The river here flowed along the bottom of a magnificent gorge with precipitous sides, and on the return journey I had as wild a ride as I am likely to experience.

Righi had started back a full half-hour before me, and my pony hearing afar off the neigh of his companion, galloped hard along a narrow ledge with a sheer drop below. Full of spirit, and very strong, these Thibetan ponies will gallop up a steep slope where another horse would crawl; and here, on the level, mine went like the wind, kicking loose stones into the flood below.

Near Darjeeling there is a small Llama monastery, a two-storeyed building with a broad foot-wide black border painted round the doors and window openings. Outside stand, in a semicircle, tall poles with long strips of linen prayer-flags fastened lengthwise from the tops downwards, and on each side of the main entrance a row of prayer-wheels mounted on end {137} and fastened to the wall under wooden eaves. The sight of these last carried me back far to the West to a little Gothic church of St Nicholas in Prisiac, where a wooden prayer-wheel of local make, of which I think there are few in Europe, is dropping to pieces with age.

Within the monastery a row of clean-looking brass bowls of water stood in front of some bronze figures, and on each side of a central shrine was ranged a series of pigeon-holes containing the monastery library, while, leaning against the latter, stood some metal trumpets 6 feet long, jointed and telescopic. Upstairs I was shown the large grotesque wooden masks and beautiful brocaded silk dresses for the priest-dances.

I have travelled in many parts of the world now, but I have not yet found any place where there is no dancing. Even inanimate nature quickens into rhythmic movement. The waves dance to the sun and the stars dance in the sea, and in the world of sentient beings birds dance to their mates. It expressed the exuberance of children's joy before ever it became an art, and whether or not Aristotle was justified in his high estimate, dancing is more universal than poetry.

I could not see a Thibetan priest dance, but I did enjoy, thanks again to Mr Righi, a dance of Thibetan peasants, very elaborately costumed {138} and weirdly pantomimic. It was called the "Amban" dance, and represented the homage of a group of Thibetan heads of villages to the "Amban," who was, as far as I could understand, some kind of ambassador or trading representative of the Chinese Government--but mingled with it were imagery and symbolism of local legend and mythology.

The dance was held at night on an open space of grass, and began with the appearance of a little strange flitting figure bearing a stick in each hand which held a white cloth stretched above the head. Up and down like some erratic moth the figure bounded, ran and postured; and presently the "Amban" presented himself grandly dressed on a hobby-horse and wearing a long peacock's feather in his conical Chinese hat. Later in the dance entered two "lions" or "dragons," gigantic creatures made up of two men each, with undulating bodies (hung with white Yak hair), tails, and wildly grotesque scarlet heads with enormous eyes and gaping "practicable" mouths, from which large red tongues flapped or depended. Then came a peacock, a sacred bird, which the dragons sought vainly to harm; and an extremely funny turtle, which they eventually devoured, the child performer slipping out of its bamboo framework before the latter was gobbled up.

Sunday morning is the best time to see the {139} bazaar at Darjeeling, and the types of people from many different provinces. Here was a bearded Kashmiri squatting at his door, grinding seeds in a small mortar; there was a group of Nepauli ladies richly-dressed and accompanied by servants. They wore a strange head-dress, a large circular plaque fastened at an angle above the hair and ornamented with jewels; there were Lepchu men from Sikkim, bare-footed, with hats of felt-like material with folded-up brims and clothes of European pattern under ample cloaks.

The baskets and crates of the vegetable-sellers were often beautiful and more worth attention than the stock-in-trade of the curio shops prepared for the tourist. The best of these latter were the fur dealers, and especially one shop containing some beautiful skins of the snow leopard.

Among the Thibetans the method of carrying great weights on the back is by a strap round the forehead, which throws most of the bearing-strain on the muscles of the neck. Both men and women carried in this way heavy loads to market; but the porterage of luggage from the railway station was almost entirely performed by women, and I saw several times a woman carrying up-hill a heavy American trunk, while her baby hung in front of her suspended in a sling.

Snow fell as I was leaving Darjeeling, and it {140} was in the middle of a snowstorm that, on one of the worst curves of the railway, I caught sight of the words painted in large letters on the face of the rock,--"Prepare to meet thy God." I incline to think that the number of passers-by who derive any satisfaction from such disfigurements of nature is so small that their perpetrators are merely objectionable. The wintry landscape was now exquisitely beautiful; snow dappled the hillsides and lay upon the tree-ferns, making them like large white stars, as if in gigantic magnification of the snow-crystals themselves. Amid such loveliness suddenly appeared evidence of further enterprise on the part of Western religionists. "Heaven or Hell--which?" was painted on another broad surface of rock, and I thought that somehow a legend in Urdu would have been less offensive to my eyes.

After it grew dark, the engine carried a bright kerosene flarelight, which illuminated both sides of the track. As the train wound along the ever-curving road on the steep sides of the hill, the effect was like being in the hilltops with Peter Pan. Peter was not to be seen, but there was something so fairy-like about the beautiful masses of foliage and blossom, clearly and yet softly light against the star-strewn darkness beyond, that I think he must have been just in front of the engine.

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At Siliguri I crossed the river, as on the way up, by the ferry steamer. There was a black stream of smoke from our funnel and a level white line from the boat's searchlight. Presently a third streak appeared in the darkness, a line of white sand on the farther bank. It was nearly dawn time and a little faint colour was just showing in the Eastern sky, making the sand look ghostly. The Calcutta train was waiting here; and soon after it started, the disc of the sun rose blood-red out of the level mist.

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