The first few miles of track lie in a dense jungle, with vegetation of truly tropical luxuriance.  Cane stalks grow fifty and sixty feet high, the grass is fifteen feet deep, beautiful bamboo trees, whose foliage is as fine as feathers, and palms which have plumage like a peacock and a bird of paradise, lift their proud and haughty heads above an impenetrable growth which, the guides tell us, is the home of tigers, rhinoceroses, panthers, bears, wild hogs, buffaloes, deer and all sorts of beasts, and snakes as big around as a barrel.  Fern trees are lovely, and are found here in their greatest glory, but nevertheless we have foliage at home, and they are no more beautiful than our elms, oaks, and other trees that I might mention.

This is a great tea country, and the mountain sides have been cleared in many places for plantations.  A tea planter in India is a heavy swell.  He may be no more brilliant or intellectual or virtuous or handsome, but the fact that he grows tea instead of potatoes or wheat or sugar gives him a higher standing in the social scale.  I was asking an explanation of this phenomenon from a very wise man the other day, and, although he insisted that his attention had never been called to it before, he was willing to admit that it was so, and he explained it on the theory that so many sons of dukes and earls and lords and the swagger set in England had come to India to engage in tea growing that they had created a caste of their own; so that whenever a man said he was a tea planter the public immediately assumed that his father belonged to the nobility and treated him accordingly.  The tea planters usually live in good style.  They have beautiful bungalows, gardens, lawns and groves, and although they complain of the depression of the industry, there is no evidence that they suffer for want of the necessities of life.  In the Darjeeling district are about two hundred large plantations, employing from one to two thousand laborers each, and producing about 12,000,000 pounds a year.  Most of the product is shipped to England.

They carry you up the mountains in tiny little cars seating six persons and open all around so that the passengers can take in all there is to see, and they have plenty of scenery.  The trains are not allowed to run faster than six miles an hour as a precaution against accidents, which allows plenty of time to look about, and they twist around so that you can see things from various points of view.  And if a passenger gets impatient or is in a hurry he can jump out of the car and walk ahead.

There is little doubt that the views from Darjeeling include the most majestic assemblage of mountains on the earth’s surface.  For a distance of 200 miles east and west there arise a succession of peaks not less than 22,000 feet high, and several of them more than 25,000.  In the immediate vicinity and within sight are the highest mountains in the world.  Everest, the king of mountains, which measures 29,200 feet, is only eighty miles distant; Kinchinjunga, which is forty-five miles distant, is 28,156 feet high, and also, in the immediate vicinity, are the following: