Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/130

108 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, 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