Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/336

314 then affixed,—"as per contract," said the babu,—made fast by traces running to a tonga, or steel bar fastened yoke-wise to both girths. Away they went by leaps and bounds, and at a gallop, up hill, around corners, and along a country road through the foothills. Every three or four miles, the driver winded his horn, the ponies redoubled their efforts to run away, and we bounded into a tonga station, where the relay ponies stood waiting in harness. The steel bar was loosened and pinned to the girths of the new ponies, the traces and reins made fast, and we shot forth at the fixed gait of eight miles an hour.

It was a clear, cloudless day, with hoar-frost over the grass of the bare hillsides and on the rice-fields that in curving terraces filled every valley and ravine, rippling away in lines that seemed designed for ornament only. There were plantations of trees, but no forests—none of the jungles that one expects at the foot of such a mountain-range. In the distance clumps of intensely green Pinus longifolia waved their nine- and ten-inch-long needles as softly as bamboos. We mounted long inclines, whence we had a magnificent view of the hills and plains below, or looked up and across to the loops of the road above us. Sometimes we could watch the next relay station as we drove toward it, and with the glasses note the preparations for our arrival. Bullock-trains under guard of sepoys, low mail-tongas bringing convalescents down from the sanatoriums, and a few camel-trains passed by. The bearded Sikhs, the turbaned Pathans, and the handsome Kashmiris of Lahore and Amritsar streets had vanished, and in