HILLTOP IN THE HIMALAYAS

Waikato Times, Volume 122, Issue 20498, 14 May 1938, Page 13 (Supplement)

HILLTOP IN THE HIMALAYAS

Across the Roof of the World

(Lawrence C. Green in American Journal.)

Across the roof of the world drives a cold wind. Twenty young men with white robes and khaki helmets are singing in the darkness, a bearded father leading the magnificent Latin voices. In a group apart stands a grey-haired Scottish missionary woman with her Nepalese girls. When the last deep notes of the choir fade, there is a pause. Then the girls chant a hymn. We are all conscious of the wind from the snows, but no one moves for shelter. This is the period before dawn on a hilltop in the Himalayas—such a dawn as I shall never see again. “ Ten minutes,” whispers my Moslem guide from the Hotel Mount Everest. I had come up from the furnace of Calcutta, joining the Darjeeling Mail two nights before. The railway police with fixed bayonets on the Sealdah platform, the feverish bazaars, the masses were left behind as the train, one of India’s finest, went swiftly over clicking point, through roaring tunnel, to a land of bamboo and palm. It was a relief, a taste of the Greater Release Ahead. There was a motor-car waiting, ready to climb eight thousand feet in three hours. As we mounted the narrow hill trail I looked back and saw the Grand Trunk Road, “bearing without crowding India’s traffic for fifteen hundred miles—such river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.” Down there was another India. Here I could button a leather coat round me and begin to breathe air that refreshed. The cart road, fifty miles to Darjeeling, follows the railway track closely; a track that even visiting engineers must gaze upon in wonder. It has daring loops and those peculiar “reverses” which are supposed to have been suggested by the wife (a skilful dancer) of a construction engineer who had brought the line into a tight corner and could see no way of carrying it further up the precipitous hillside. Soon we are in the Terai, forest of wild game. Here station-masters barricade -A themselves against tigers and engine-drivers whistle hopefully while elephants tear up the mile posts. The car encounters none of these difficulties. At each railway station my driver reports and is handed a printed chit signifying a road clear of down-coming motor-cars to the next section. The precaution is necessary. All the bends are hairpins, always the road is narrow and littered with bullock carts. We are # shut in by a jungle of rubber. At Kurseong, a hill station below the five thousand foot level, I see the first of the hill people with their Mongol faces and sturdy appearance. Here is Buddhism, prayers fluttering on banners in the wind. Another nineteen miles, through rice fields and terraced tea gardens, past the monastery of the merry lamas at Ghoom, through the main street (where the trains run, puffing smoke into the huts), and the car rounds a pine-clad spur and enters Darjeeling on its ridge nearly a mile and ahalf above the sea. Darjeeling, they say, is the most pleasant of India’s thirty hill stations. This town of Swiss chalets and solid British mansions is the summer headquarters of the Bengal Government, wisely chosen. Parts of Darjeeling reminded me of Madeira, others of Gibraltar. Few towns present more contrasts daring a short walk. The new wing of the Planters’ Club is modem enough for a Johannesburg suburb; but you see members arriving at a jog-trot in sedan chairs. At the “ Chowrasta,” where the streets converge near the bandstand and everyone—white, brown and yellow—stops to gossip, you see the Charing Cross of Darjeeling and shops like little London shops. The pillar-boxes and lamp-posts might have been uprooted from London and planted in this weird scene. But down in the market-place you realise that you have come almost to the edge of the known world. Here among the heaped mangoes and coconuts move men and women from the remote and inaccessible native States of Sikkim and Nepal. Here, too, are people in hundreds from beyond a more

mysterious frontier—wild Tibetans in blanket robes, pig-tailed women, gipsies from an unexplored country selling prayer wheels and beaten brass. This district lies on the main caravan route to Tibet. Only in recent years, however, have the Tibetans ventured into Darjeeling. Now’ they arrive regularly with their wives and children, their long-haired, grunting yak oxen, and dogs. Darjeeling is perched on the hillside so that from the valley you look up at hotels and bungalows, mosques and missions and cantonments one above the other for more than a thousand feet. The Town Ends in a Tea Garden. Though there is hardly an acre of flat land anywhere, a golf course has been laid out at Senchal, the “hill of mists.” When the air is clear, the players look across at the world’s grandest panorama—the whole Kanchenjunga range. The mountains, of course, explain the fascination of Darjeeling. That w r as why I fouftd myself waiting for daybreak on the summit of Tiger Hill. At the impossible hour of three that morning, Mowla Buksh had brought my tea and thrown logs on the fire. Half an hour later I was wrapped in blankets in a rickshaw hauled by four fur-capped Tibetans. Later I discovered that I could have avoided this primitive form of transport by taking a small car to within three-quarters of a mile of the summit. The knowledge came too late. My muscular Tibetans were tackling the climb of seventeen hundred feet to the Tiger Hill observatory. Beside us rode the guide, mounted on a pony, making the journey for the thousandth time, probably, and enjoying it. During the halts I learnt that the Tibetans had all accompanied Mount Everest expeditions as porters. Proudly they showed me papers signed by a man whose name I had read respectfully and with a thrill— Hugh Ruttledge. The oldest man had been to London and Paris w’ith a band of Tibetan dancers. Two days after his return to Darjeeling he had Gambled All His Earnings Away. Yet they were happy, those Tibetans; I wondered how they had developed their sense of humour in the highest inhabited land on the earth’s surface. They had a joke for everyone on the road. So I stood there on the hilltop at last watching the strange, unearthly colours of dawn touching the Himalayas. When the light came, with unexpected swiftness, I saw the clouds below me as I have seen them from aeroplanes. But this was different. There was a memorable stillness, the vast hush that rests always over the high places. In silence the guide pointed so that I should not miss the first rays of the sun leaping from range to snowy range like a brand of fire setting the highest of the globe ablaze. Everest, more than a hundred miles away, was a flash that vanished. We faced Kanchenjunga; and the day was so clear that the glacier at thirteen thousand feet could be seen without glasses. That was the level of the snow. Once in ten years, perhaps, it is possible to watch the snows of Kanchenjunga torn by a blizzard. At other times the mist comes down like a curtain. From this point twelve peaks, all more than twenty thousand feet high, can be seen at a glance. Turn round, and there are the distant river steamers where the Ganges winds across the plains. But you will not gaze long in that direction. Peak after peak, range after dazzling range, Grip and Hold You. Over there is Chomolungma—Goddess Mother of Mountains. Your eyes rove towards it again and again. Reluctantly I left the great scene. I have stared unmoved at the Victoria Falls; before that day I travelled to see cities and people, contemptuous of mere landscapes. The Himalayas showed me the bright face of adventure in a new mood and I came away marvelling at the courage of men who cannot rest until they have won their victory over the highest peak of all.