KURSIONG. morning meal. The silence of the hills was impressive; here and there a firefly, here and there, across the valley, or through the trees, the twinkle of the light in a native hut. At daybreak next morning we were again in the saddle, and rode ten miles over lovely hills with wooded sides and varied ravines, clad in forest and brushwood to Kursiong. The views were fine, and the verdure beautiful. The air was delightfully clear and cool, and peasants of the native tribes were passing to their work along the mountain paths. Kursiong is four thousand six hundred feet above the sea, a village perched on the ridge of a hill; and here we had our first sight of the Himalayas. Kinchinjunga, the second highest of the range, twenty-eight thousand feet, was full in view, though sixty miles away. The sight was grand and impressive. The air became more keen and bracing, and after the refreshment of breakfast in a comfortable inn, we mounted fresh ponies and started on the remaining twenty miles. The road is lovely in the extreme, skirting the flanks and rounding the spurs of the mountains, carried by bridges over deep ravines with roaring torrents, and adorned with luxuriant tropical vegetation, splendid orchids, graceful tree-ferns, flowering creepers and noble trees. After crossing the ridge called "the Saddle," we came through the barracks used as a convalescent depôt, and rode on to the delightfully placed lodgings which we had beforehand engaged, distant just fifteen minutes' walk from the Observatory Hill and the Mall, and with the sublime snows towering high before us;--a spot much frequented by Calcutta officials during the hot season. At sunrise on Sunday morning I walked round the Mall and up to the Observatory, which commands a full view of the stupendous scenery. Never did I understand so fully the force of the apostle's expression, "depth and height," as now that I had before me the giant mountains, and looked down into the depths, deeper and deeper still, six thousand feet, into the forest-clad ravine of the Great Ranjit river, and then slowly raised my eyes higher and higher through the successive ridges of foliage and rocks, till they reached the eternal snows, and still far up and up to the peaks soaring into the sky. From the lowest point which the eye can reach in the Ranjit valley to the highest peak of Kinchinjunga, the vertical height is not less than five miles -such a thickness of the earth's crust being probably nowhere else visible on the earth's surface. More than twelve peaks can be counted which rise above twenty thousand feet. The air was cold and bracing, the grass was crisp and white with frost; the sun shot his rays across in dazzling splendour, and in the stillness and brightness of the scene one felt as if transported to another world. After morning service in the little English church, I went down to the square bazaar or market-place, which is crowded on Sundays with strange nationalities. Here were the old aborigines, the LEPCHAS, with Mongolian type of face, oblique eyes, high cheek-bones, clad in striped cotton garments; the men with pigtails like the Chinese, the women with nose-rings and large silver ornaments, some with strings of rupees. They are a small, plain, but powerful-looking race, inured to hardship, nomadic, but amiable. Their besetting sin is gambling. They are a merry and careless people, with but little thought of the morrow. They are very fond of quoits, using pieces of slate for the purpose, which they throw with great dexterity. They always wear a long knife, curved like a sickle and stuck in the girdle, which serves them to fell trees, skin animals, build huts, pare their nails, sever their food, and even pick their HIMALAYA HILL GIRL. |