juggler, the rope, and the boy--An inexplicable incident--A performing
cobra scores a success--Ceylon "Devil Dancers"--Their performance--The
Temple of the Tooth--The uncovering of the Tooth--Details
concerning--An abominable libel--Tea and coffee--Peradeniya
Gardens--The upas tree of Java--Colombo an Eastern Clapham
Junction--The French lady and the savages--The small Bermudian and the
inhabitants of England.


During our early morning walks through the jungle-tracts of Assam, on
clear days we occasionally caught a brief glimpse of a glittering
white cone on the horizon. This was mighty Kinchinjanga, the second
highest mountain in the world, distant then from us I should be afraid
to say how many miles.

To see Kinchinjanga to perfection, one must go to Darjeeling. What a
godsend this cool hill-station is to Calcutta, for in twenty hours the
par-boiled Europeans by the Hooghly can find themselves in a
temperature like that of an English April. At Silliguri, where the
East Bengal Railway ends, some humorist has erected, close to the
station, a sign-post inscribed "To Lhassa 359 miles." The sign-post
has omitted to state that this entails an ascent of 16,500 feet. The
Darjeeling-Himalayan Railway, an intrepid little mountain-climber,
looks as though it had come out of a toy-shop, for the gauge is only
two feet, and the diminutive engines and carriages could almost be
pulled about with a string. As the little train pants its leisurely
way up 6000 feet, it is worth while noticing how the type of the
country people changes. The brown-skinned Aryan type of the plains is
soon replaced by the yellow, flat-faced Mongolian type of the hills,
and the women actually have a tinge of red in their cheeks.