Indianapolis Journal, Volume 54, Number 66, Indianapolis, Marion County, 6 March 1904 — Page 35

HOME SUPPLEMENT SUNDAY JOURNAL.

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Wonderful Mountain City at Thibet's Gate

DARJEELING! And roses with cold dew on i them. Only twenty -one hours ago we were sweltering in Calcutta. Only fifteen hours ago we were grinding through the hot red land, and crossing the burning Ganges. And now we climb to Darjeeling out of the land of sand and immense sad rivers and palms, into the land of northern roses and fir trees and rhododendrons. It is wonderful to flee from the overwhelming throb and flimmer of Calcutta and rind one's self over night facing the pure while gateway int secret Thibet to feel cold winds blowing from a thousand miles of virgin mountain to see folk Iresscd in heavy stuffs and furs when yesterday we pushed through bronzed figures shining with the heat under their gauzy, transparent silks. It is good to escape for a space from the crying city Calcutta, the never sleeping, where the men from the seven seas meet the men from the sealed jungle and the forbidden hills; where all the races of earth, the eldest and the youngest, mingle for a space, learn from each other new versions of the rigin.il seven stories of the world, and part again, each a mystery as before to the other. It is a magic flight with the North Bengal States Railway as the enchanted carpet the new magic of the Occident darting through the home of the old magic of the Orient. Scarcely has the train reached the open plain and begun to speed by the little stations with the names of Kipling-Land on them before the traveler experiences that feeling which one experiences nowhere else on the globe the feeling of being among mortality counted by the million. Even on stretches of road where only a few natives are in sight, the ponderous presence throughout the hot land of multitudes is heavy on one. The very earth seems to breathe forth the breath of living, perspiring, patient humanity. The pulses of the millions fill the very air. The minutes are pregnant with their passing lives. Almost due north point the rails through the sunglare and the dust. And presently one hundred miles are gone ami in the dusk a broad, calm river flows across the line of flight the Ganges, tremend ous with its age- of worship. Up and down the stream sounds the echoing scream as the steam train greets the steam ferry; it startles tall, thin Hindus who are dipping up the holy water that their ancestors drank two thousand years ago as they do now, with hardly a form or an emotion changed since then in the land and they look up with fiery - yes at the screaming thing that was invented less than two centuries ago and is conquering their land and overwhelming the old traditions that twenty centuries of war and craft and ambition and intrigue have not been able to alter an iota. From the windows the traveler may see croco1 diles blotching the sandy shallows that peer from the wide water. He may see a corpse or two floating placidly down the river toward the mighty Brahmapootra floating downward unheeded, as the dead have floated down the Ganges from the dim past the ancient, careless, wanton tribute that an aged land has paid unceasingly from its overcrowded life. At every station squats the raw material for the Ganges tribute the little children like perfect i bronzes, swift to place the backs of their hands to their foreheads with a Salaam, Sahib;" the adults, lean-shanked, with ribs showing like those of greyhounds; ami all, young and old, squatting patient, with deep eyes staring, as they have squatted ever since history began, for cholera and famine to stoop to them a3 regularly as the changing seasons stoop to us. But now all the rivers that we see in the night are flowing due south; from the lands of feudal kings, the mountains of the snows, the land of the Hima laya. The weary eyes of the Anglo-Indians begin to brighten; the pale faces of the women begin to color. The life-giving air of the highlands of Sikkim and Nepal is stealing into the train, and every revolution of the wheel- makes its breath stronger and clearer. All through the breathless Indian night it grows, enlarges, sparkle-; the yellow dawn shines on dew-; and at 6 o'clock the train unloads shivering passengers in a chilly land, to transfer to the little twoifoot wide mountain road that is to climb to the end of Indian civilization and the beginning of the vast Mongolian world Darjeeling, the place of the hang-

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There are other things, too, to see in Darjeeling; anywhere else these other things would be considered as worth a long trip to see; but Darjeeling has a sight that is so great, so entrancing, so overpowering, that it leaves no room for lessor things to nake even an impression. Over Darjeeling, suspended in the very sky abov it, floating far up in the air, arc the peaks of the Himalayas fifty, seventy-five, a hundred miles away by chart, yet hanging above cloud and mist before the eyes of the beholder in this little mountain vi! t.iia ..Ii flw .?(T iif (Mil I

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SUNDAY MARCH 6, 1904'.

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Where the Himalayas Seem to Be Overhead

ward to space unbounded. So high and awtul dit rise that the beholder, far, far away though it bet must crane his neck to look toward its summit. Suddenly, high up on the peak of the wall, there comes a startling something that is not light, but only a lightening of the heavy gloom. Scarcely has the eye caught it before it has melted into lilac a lilac so delicate, so evanescent, that H seems to dissolve into unnameable tints even as one looks. And then the lilac suddenly grows strong, ami lo! it is pink. And the pink bums into rose. The clouds part like a riven veil; the rose burnnow over all their high-hung masses, and behold' there are no clouds up there; they have vanished and we did not mark it; in their place, suspended in high heaven, over our very heads, with silver mistwreathing deep below, hangs the peak of the White King of Himalaya Mount Everest, 29.000 feet high and I .ro miles away. W e are looking clear across the State of Nepal, and the peak seems to be almos

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You ride to Tiger Hill in the morning, before the stars have begun to pale, over a path that hftftgl precariously to walls of rock; it it were not dark.

you could look straight down from your saddle into two thousand feet of rhododendron-clad space. As the night begins to pa--, the eye. sweeping

over a kingdom of valleys and hills to the northwest, sees at first a great gray wall of cloud a wall that reaches upward to space immeasurable, down

Vast, unimpassioned. pure; so spotless in its solemn beauty, so mighty in its tender morning grandeuryou stand in a world that still is black and stricken with night, and in that far-off play of pearl and lapis-lazuli you see the tremendous mystery of the day move on a world that lies as white and still as if this were, indeed, the First Day, when a terrible voice spoke and said, "Let there be light!" Not only Everest thus produces Nature's Passin Play at Darjeeling. Looking due north from the mountain city, across plucky, defiant Sikkim, over fifty miles of mountains in tremendous ranks the eye sees Mount Kichinjunga. Twenty-eight thou sand feet high Is its peak. Tanu and Kebru. one 25,000. the other 24,000 feet in air, gleam in the morning, catching the sun's burning eye while it is still sunken deep below the horizon of the dwe lers of lower earth. And as you look at those peaks, swimming in the pure air, you realize that you are looking upon the most truly virgin land of the world; for in all thcountless centuries since the Himalayan chain first was piled to cut into the hard, clear, blue sky 01 Mongolian Asia, through all the generations of man. they have stood untarnished by human foot un tarnished, unassailable, primeval. Sometime Mount Everest condescends to unveil himself completely, and then he stands clear to sight from peak to base to the people in Darjeeling as if they were dwelling at his foot. Then the might of the Himalayas seem- a very present thing in thlittle town; the summits look down into the streets, and wherever one turns the white mountains command the day. The visitor realizes then why this place, that looks like an Alpine village transplanted into A-1.1. . is ca.lled Darjeeling. which means "the Wide Island of Meditation." An island of meditation it is to-day. to which the lama goes from Thibet and the Hindu from the south. A place of pilgrimage, it is, too, for the English, to w hich they plod when the burning plain has come near to conquering them. It is refreshing tu see the people, so different from the people of the plain. In Darjeeling swag ger the strong tribesmen of the mountain States--huge and black and bearded. Wrapped in rags on top of rags, and furs on top of furs, squat the ugl . slit-eyed men from cold, snow bitten Thibet, with pleasant articles of Thibetan demon worship, such as drums made from human skull-, warranted to call demons from the other world, and delightful trump ets made from human thigh bone-. In the half open bazaars sit men with the skins of tigers, panthers, sables, foxes and the beautiful long haired snow leopards. High turbaned Kabuli- offer rugs and embroideries carried by hazardous moun tain pass and ambushed defile from far Bokhara The beauties of Darjeeling are the girls from Bhotan, the neighboring mountain State. They hav merry faces, full of dimples, and arc garbed in glory; for, though they do not cultivate cleanliness notic ably, they do know how to set off their charm- with rich color. So a Bhotan girl, who presently will act as your coolie, is garbed in wine-red skirts. Turquoise ear rings sometimes as long as seven inches, hang to her shapely shouhler-. Her arms and wri-ts are fetooned with brass and iron and shell bracelets, main of them buried deeply into the fleh and intergrowu with it, because the ornaments are never removed after they are put on in youth. Silver chains hang over tft. Some of them ser f to gird up the dress. Others hold toilet article-, chief among which is a bryom with which th Bh. tan girls whisk each other's hair on the streets when there is no baggage to nunc; for these magnificent creatures are the baggage carriers of Darjeeling. The Bhotan men have been good enough to turn their women folk into coolie- The female does all the work, such as carrying loads up and down the mountains, transporting goodl ami carrying bag gage in Darjeeling. It is cheaper than horse- and the women appear to thrive under it. Certainly they arc the jotlie! and most independent and powerful lt of fein.i!. -that a man un lind anywhere in hid'