Page:Three Years in Tibet.djvu/34

10 a train of small mountaineering cars, which, faring ever northward, forthwith began its tortuous ascent of the Himālayas, or rather, of the outer skirt of the mighty range. With its bends and turns and climbings, as the train labored onward and upward through the famous "ḍalai-jungle," it looked like some amphibian monster on its war path, as I fancied, while the grind of the car wheels, with its sound echoed and re-echoed, seemed to spread quaking terror over peaks and dales. By 3 ., the train had made a climb of fifty miles and then landed us at Darjeeling, which place is 380 miles distant from Calcutta. At the station I hired a ḍanlee, which is a sort of mountaineering palanquin, and, borne in it, I soon afterward arrived at Rai Saraṭ's retreat, Lhasa Villa, which I found to be a magnificent mansion.