CHAPTER VIII
THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD
N traveling north from Calcutta toward Darjiling, we had the same springless, cheerless, dusty railway cars as in Southern India; the same bare floors, hard, leather-covered sofas, and rattling windows of violet glass that gave a wintry, melancholy look to the flat Bengal plain that we jolted over all the afternoon. After sunset it grew really cold in the bare, dimly lighted box, that finally halted amid clamoring torch-bearers on a siding by a river bank. It might as well have been the crumbling mud banks of the upper Missouri as those of the sacred Ganges that we descended to reach a flat-bottomed, stern-wheel river steamer of American model; but no band of Sioux or Crees on the war-path ever raised such din as the coolies at Damoekdea when the "up-mail" arrived. The very stars seemed to reel from the noise, and we breathed deep sighs of thanksgiving when the boat wheezed away from the movable station and on across "sacred Mother Ganges" to Sara Ghat, where another horde of coolies lay in wait, shrieking and gesticulating in the torchlight as the boat
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