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 advanced. "I catch coolies," said David, and he did so, dragging them on board by leg, arm, or turban end, as chanced. Although we had telegraphed to have lower sofas reserved, the Anglo-Indian railway brain has not been equal to devising or borrowing a system of numbering and definitely securing such a reservation. Possession was to the swiftest, and the foot-race up a soft bank and over ends of railway ties by torchlight warmed one at least. The air grew colder, and bitterly colder, as we rumbled along through the night, and the loose-fitting doors and windows sent frosty currents across us. From dreams of Pullman curtains, blankets, soft mattresses and springs, of double windows and thick carpets, of sixteen-wheeled trucks with cylindrical springs under long cars hung far above the dusty road-bed, we woke to the cold reality of our freight-and cattle-car comforts. Before daylight tea-trays flashed in the lamplight of way stations, and cups of freshly made tea thawed one and cheered the gray hour of dawn, while the thick frost haze of the plain half obscured the sky.
By six o'clock it was light enough to see that the people had changed overnight with the temperature. We had left the sleek, supple, barefooted Bengali in his sheeted drapery, with his thin nose and deep eyes, and come to a race with high cheek bones and flat Mongol faces, first cousins to the Chinese, even to the cut of their loose-sleeved coats with overlapping fronts, and their high cloth boots. The queue and the turban were worn together; and that was not more incongruous than the Hindu caste-mark on the brow of a flat, Mongol face. There were ruddy-faced mountaineers in Tatar caps on the platforms, and unveiled women with elaborate head-dresses and necklaces of silver, coral, and turquoises. Beyond the trees and houses of Haldibari station there loomed a great rose-pink line of peaks and snowy battlements, stretching across the upper sky and resting above ridges of tremendous blue and hazily purple mountains. As the sun rose, the peaks paled, turned to gold and silvery white, and the greatest mountain wall in the world stood sharply revealed, twenty-eight thousand feet in air, a parapet of high heaven, the first sight of which leaves one breathless. Beyond all other mountain views is that first sight of the Himalayas, as the great line of snow-peaks towers from the Siliguri-plain.
After such mundane things as coffee and eggs, the most absurd little narrow-gage cars, with only canvas curtains as protection from the changes of mountain weather, trundled us across a few level miles, and more slowly began climbing through shady jungles and along cleared hillsides, with now a view out to the level, yellow plain where a shining river stretched to hazy distance, and now a view toward silvery peaks that rose continually higher. The tiny engine gained a thousand feet in altitude each hour, creeping along hillsides planted with monotonous lines of tea-bushes, through dry and dusty jungles where trees and tree-ferns, creepers and underbrush, were parched and frost-nipped, dull with the dust of the dry season. The toy train crawled over curves and loops, and one wished that the Gladstone family, owning the line, had provided, instead of the string of cabs linked together, one well-built and windowed trolley-car, that one might sit in comfort and enjoy the views that continually opened. Flat-faced Lepcha and Bhutia women stared with uncovered faces and Chinese stolidity as the train slowly passed them, each woman a family savings-bank with the hoarded rupees strung in overlapping rows on her head and neck. Tibetans, too, were seen, and at Kurseong, five thousand feet above the sea, in the midst of tea-gardens, we were only nineteen miles from the Tibetan frontier. After tiffin in the chill, whitewashed dining-room of the Kurseong hotel, we thawed ourselves in the sunny garden, where a Catholic priest from the adjoining mission-house pointed the way to the pass at the edge of Tibet, where he had been spending some months. Although the Tibetans come freely across the boundary to trade and to work in the tea plantations, all English and Europeans are rigorously excluded, and none of the Indian tea openly reaches Tibet; the Chinese monopoly of the tea trade being the chief reason for the severe exclusion laws the lamas maintain.
Kunchinjinga seemed no nearer, only higher, still higher, and looming larger against the sky. The air was decidedly a nipping one, and with all our rugs and razais and hot-water cans at our feet, we found the foolish little open tram-car anything but a rational conveyance for high mountain travel, still less appropriate when we ran into a dense, woolly white cloud that hid everything for half an hour. The toy engine screeched, wheezed, panted, and slowly drew us up to cloudland by many loops and switchbacks; going backward and forward, but always upward, until we came to Ghoom, a double row of huts lining the track. There were picturesque folk in that bazaar, and foremost was the "witch of Ghoom," a wrinkled squaw who claimed to be one hundred years old, and begged for an anna on that account. A stumpy little Gurkha officer boarded the train there, his breast covered with war medals, and his wife covered with rows and rows of gold and silver coin necklaces and strings of coral, turquoise, and amber beads; her head as thickly plated with family assets, and her costume only richer in material than the bright purple, red, green, orange, and yellow garments of the hill folk that made Ghoom's one street a lane of color and light. Children rode pickaback instead of astride the Hindu hip; all loads were carried on the back by a strap over the brow, and after the inert and melancholy Hindus, these hill folk seemed a light-hearted, laughing people.
We were eight hours in accomplishing the fifty miles, reaching an elevation of 7470 feet at Ghoom, and descending to 6000 feet at Darjiling, a whole daylight of child's play with a toy train to any one who has traveled on Colorado's narrow-gage mountain railways.
We were carried from the station to the hotel in dandy-wallahs, carrying-chairs like the swan and shell chariots of stage pantomimes, the bearers turning them backward to climb steps or steep places. From the hotel windows and the terraced roads of the town, which occupies the crest of a knife-edged ridge, one has a full view of the front of Kunchinjinga and the long running line of snows across the deep chasm of the Ranjit. All too soon sunset reversed the pageant of the morning, and as the white peaks changed to gold, flame color, and rose-pink, blue and purple mists filled each ravine and valley. The rosy phantom lingered long before fading to cold gray and silver, the western sky glowing for a full hour, and a young white moon showing through the leafless trees.
The bazaar or market-place was empty then, for its gala time is on Sunday morning, when the tea-pickers come from remotest plantations to show and buy their finery; but there was a curio-shop whose owner was chiefest curio of the lot—one of the many who announce that they will surely reach Lhasa. He was then studying Tibetan, and produced an alleged lama who was disloyally teaching him the language and the religious exercises and formula that would help him to enter Lhasa in disguise. The lama fitted well into the room full of prayer-wheels, skull drums, skull bowls, tobacco-pouches, relic-boxes, bells, and images, and his presence surely helped business. With serious face the would-be explorer told how he should be welcomed to Lhasa as an envoy of the Theosophical Societies of Paris and London; how he should gather religious objects for Prince Ferdinand d'Este, and butterflies for Baron Rothschild, the latter guaanteeing all the expenses of the trip for the sake of the resulting collections. He had butterflies by the hundreds, great jewel-winged creatures of every color, with iridescent shadings and velvet bloom that were a delight to the eye. Tibet may still be worth penetrating for unknown butterflies, but from the early visits of French priests and English travelers down to the recent visit of Pundit Chandra Das, of native members of the Geological Survey of India, and of the Japanese Buddhist priests, about all that the world in general wants to know about Lhasa is known. Photographs of its streets and monasteries prove the correctness of the old engravings; Dr. Waddell has translated and edited the very complete local guide for Lhasa; and three women have gone as near to Lhasa as any explorer since Abbé Hue. All the blue-eyed travelers naturally failed to disguise themselves, and the Japanese had least difficulty in the enterprise.
Long before daylight the next morning we started in chairs in frosty darkness, a sky full of glittering stars lighting dimly the gigantic white shadows so strangely high in the sky. We passed through the military station and sanatorium of Jelapahar, along the side of the knife-ridge to Ghoom, and up to the isolated summit of Tiger Hill, fifteen hundred feet higher than Darjiling, where nothing interrupts the view of the whole range of snow-peaks from Kunchinjinga to Mount Everest. We sat in the lee of a boulder, wrapped in rugs and razais, our veins freezing in that thin, icy, mountain-top air, while the mixed lot of coolies and horse-boys accompanying the tourist contingent were unconscious of the cold; coolie No. 108 improving the time by tying large turquoises to holes in the lobes of his ears. They all wore these rough Tibetan turquoise ornaments, and turned many rupees by their sale while we waited for the sun, the lobe of the ear being the regulation showcase for these regular agents of a regular jewel merchant. The smart tourist always suspects the professional dealer, and much more confidingly trusts the simple hillman, and pays him a better price for bits of chalk dyed blue or ground glass of cerulean hue. The tip of Kunchinjinga, 28,150 feet in air, first turned rose-red and then caught the sun's rays, that flashed electrically down the long white line—a spectacle unequaled. Even the tourist's perpetual-motion tongue was silenced as the color pageant proceeded, and Kunchinjinga, with half of its height snow-covered, so transcended all one's imaginings that it did not seem the vision could be reality. Mount Everest, to our bitter disappointment, sulked in a tent of clouds to westward; but Kunchinjinga was visible all day long from our windows, and at sunset ran through its color changes once more.
It was degrees and degrees colder the next morning, but the sky was clearer, and the dazzling stars lighted the white phantom across the Ranjit more clearly. The frost lay like snow on Tiger Hill; the water by the wayside was frozen; and the wind blew with glacial edge that benumbed the little company of sun-worshipers gathered there at dawn. Again the world was suffused with a rose flush, a flash of sunlight touched Kunchinjinga and ran along the line of peaks clear to the three white pinnacles that rise above the depression of Chola Pass. I had not expected Mount Everest to be merely one small finger-tip of snow one hundred and twenty miles away. It was hardly worth while to hold up field-glasses in that arctic wind to look at that trifling nodule on the far horizon. It did not look like the greatest mountain in the world, "the highest measured elevation on earth." Imagination could not invest it with any superiority—not while splendid Kunchinjinga was there before us, with snow streamers and pennants and rosy cloud-banners floating away from those storehouse peaks of gold, silver, gems, and grains, as the Tibetans describe the five summits.
"Why are the globe-trotters so bent on seeing Mount Everest?" asked a Geological Survey officer. "It is not the finest peak, if it is the highest. It is only megalomania that takes the tourists off to Tiger Hill to see the highest peak in the world. Everest is not to be compared for looks with Peak XIII and Peak D². Those are the finest arrangements in rock and snow in the Himalayas. And then. Mount Everest is not in British territory, you know, and until we annex Nepal, I object to its being made so much of."
When we had come down from the Himalayan heights to the commonplace level of the plains again, and recrossed the Ganges, we had to share the two-sofa compartment with a severely silent and resentful Anglo-Indian matron, who stared at us heartlessly, contemptuously, and evidently denied us the right to occupy any part of her compartment and hemisphere. For the trip to Calcutta, she had brought with her into the compartment a tin steamer-trunk, a canvas hold-all, two dressing-bags, a Gladstone bag, a tiffin-basket, a basket tea-pot, a tin bonnet-box, a roll of razais and fur rugs, a shawl-strap bundle of cloaks and jackets, and one large bouquet. Her "boxes" were in the luggage-van.
But this lady of luggage was only forerunner to the memsahib we met when we left Calcutta the next night. We had sent the bearer ahead with our luggage two hours before train time. When we reached the Howrah station, we found that while our man was called off to pay a charge for extra luggage the paper of reservation had been unpinned from one lower berth and fastened to the upper one by an Anglo-Indian lady, who then unrolled her bedding, seated herself on it, and became deaf to any remarks or remonstrance. She had brought with her into the compartment the usual British impedimenta—tin steamer-trunk, canvas hold-all, Gladstone bag, laundry-bag, dressing-bag, tiffin-basket, a roll of umbrellas, a tennis racket, a bag with her pith hat, also a wicker chair, a collection of garments which hung from every available hook, and a large round-topped Saratoga trunk. When we protested to the station-master about the changing of his reservations, he could or dared do nothing. Possession was nine points, and the tenth was a gleam in her eye that might have warned away a lion-tamer. We produced our receipts and insisted that the station-master should send our large trunks into the compartment, too, and give us back the sixteen rupees we had paid for extra luggage, or else the memsahib's trunks should go. They went; and she paid six rupees through the window with wrath and threats. Only the thinnest veneer of civilization prevented her from laying violent hands upon us then, or strangling us in the night. Nothing so shocks and offends the Anglo-Indian traveler on American transcontinental trains as the publicity of the Pullman cars, where each berth has its curtain and number, and is as securely reserved as a theater chair. May they always occupy four-berthed, uncurtained carriages with infuriated strangers who have stolen their lower berths and owe them a grudge besides!