By and by we were well up in the region of the clouds, and from that breezy height we looked down and afar over a wonderful picture—­the Plains of India, stretching to the horizon, soft and fair, level as a floor, shimmering with heat, mottled with cloud-shadows, and cloven with shining rivers.  Immediately below us, and receding down, down, down, toward the valley, was a shaven confusion of hilltops, with ribbony roads and paths squirming and snaking cream-yellow all over them and about them, every curve and twist sharply distinct.

At an elevation of 6,000 feet we entered a thick cloud, and it shut out the world and kept it shut out.  We climbed 1,000 feet higher, then began to descend, and presently got down to Darjeeling, which is 6,000 feet above the level of the Plains.

We had passed many a mountain village on the way up, and seen some new kinds of natives, among them many samples of the fighting Ghurkas.  They are not large men, but they are strong and resolute.  There are no better soldiers among Britain’s native troops.  And we had passed shoals of their women climbing the forty miles of steep road from the valley to their mountain homes, with tall baskets on their backs hitched to their foreheads by a band, and containing a freightage weighing—­I will not say how many hundreds of pounds, for the sum is unbelievable.  These were young women, and they strode smartly along under these astonishing burdens with the air of people out for a holiday.  I was told that a woman will carry a piano on her back all the way up the mountain; and that more than once a woman had done it.  If these were old women I should regard the Ghurkas as no more civilized than the Europeans.  At the railway station at Darjeeling you find plenty of cab-substitutes —­open coffins, in which you sit, and are then borne on men’s shoulders up the steep roads into the town.

Up there we found a fairly comfortable hotel, the property of an indiscriminate and incoherent landlord, who looks after nothing, but leaves everything to his army of Indian servants.  No, he does look after the bill—­to be just to him—­and the tourist cannot do better than follow his example.  I was told by a resident that the summit of Kinchinjunga is often hidden in the clouds, and that sometimes a tourist has waited twenty-two days and then been obliged to go away without a sight of it.  And yet went not disappointed; for when he got his hotel bill he recognized that he was now seeing the highest thing in the Himalayas.  But this is probably a lie.

After lecturing I went to the Club that night, and that was a comfortable place.  It is loftily situated, and looks out over a vast spread of scenery; from it you can see where the boundaries of three countries come together, some thirty miles away; Thibet is one of them, Nepaul another, and I think Herzegovina was the other.  Apparently, in every town and city in India the gentlemen of the British civil and military service have a club; sometimes it is a palatial one, always it is pleasant and homelike.  The hotels are not always as good as they might be, and the stranger who has access to the Club is grateful for his privilege and knows how to value it.