forest, and they fell thundering into the Sutlej river and were swept
down to the plains three hundred miles away and became railway-ties.
Now and again this King, whose name does not matter, would mount a
ringstraked horse and ride scores of miles to Simla-town to confer
with the Lieutenant-Governor on matters of state, or to assure the
Viceroy that his sword was at the service of the Queen-Empress. Then
the Viceroy would cause a ruffle of drums to be sounded, and the
ringstraked horse and the cavalry of the State--two men in
tatters--and the herald who bore the silver stick before the King,
would trot back to their own place, which lay between the tail of a
heaven-climbing glacier and a dark birch-forest.

Now, from such a King, always remembering that he possessed one
veritable elephant, and could count his descent for twelve hundred
years, I expected, when it was my fate to wander through his
dominions, no more than mere license to live.

The night had closed in rain, and rolling clouds blotted out the
lights of the villages in the valley. Forty miles away, untouched by
cloud or storm, the white shoulder of Donga Pa--the Mountain of the
Council of the Gods--upheld the Evening Star. The monkeys sang
sorrowfully to each other as they hunted for dry roosts in the
fern-wreathed trees, and the last puff of the day-wind brought from
the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping
undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the
Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man
will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.
The clouds closed and the smell went away and there remained nothing
in all the world except chilling white mist and the boom of the
Sutlej river racing through the valley below. A fat-tailed sheep, who