it was.  An officer of high rank who had been in the thick of the Mutiny said the same.  As long as those men were talking about what they knew, they were trustworthy, and I believed them; but when they said it was now “cold weather,” I saw that they had traveled outside of their sphere of knowledge and were floundering.  I believe that in India “cold weather” is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.  It was observable that brass ones were in use while I was in Calcutta, showing that it was not yet time to change to porcelain; I was told the change to porcelain was not usually made until May.  But this cold weather was too warm for us; so we started to Darjeeling, in the Himalayas—­a twenty-four hour journey.

CHAPTER LV.

There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden.  Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

FROM DIARY: 

February 14.  We left at 4:30 P.M.  Until dark we moved through rich vegetation, then changed to a boat and crossed the Ganges.

February 15.  Up with the sun.  A brilliant morning, and frosty.  A double suit of flannels is found necessary.  The plain is perfectly level, and seems to stretch away and away and away, dimming and softening, to the uttermost bounds of nowhere.  What a soaring, strenuous, gushing fountain spray of delicate greenery a bunch of bamboo is!  As far as the eye can reach, these grand vegetable geysers grace the view, their spoutings refined to steam by distance.  And there are fields of bananas, with the sunshine glancing from the varnished surface of their drooping vast leaves.  And there are frequent groves of palm; and an effective accent is given to the landscape by isolated individuals of this picturesque family, towering, clean-stemmed, their plumes broken and hanging ragged, Nature’s imitation of an umbrella that has been out to see what a cyclone is like and is trying not to look disappointed.  And everywhere through the soft morning vistas we glimpse the villages, the countless villages, the myriad villages, thatched, built of clean new matting, snuggling among grouped palms and sheaves of bamboo; villages, villages, no end of villages, not three hundred yards apart, and dozens and dozens of them in sight all the time; a mighty City, hundreds of miles long, hundreds of miles broad, made all of villages, the biggest city in the earth, and as populous as a European kingdom.  I have seen no such city as this before.  And there is a continuously repeated and replenished multitude of naked men in view on both sides and ahead.  We fly through it mile after mile, but still it is always there, on both sides and ahead—­brown-bodied, naked men and boys, plowing in the fields.  But not woman.  In these two hours I have not seen a woman or a girl working in the fields.