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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