Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/129

Rh 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