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A JOURNEY IN SIKHIM.

SIKHIм, probably the most mountainous country in the world, is a country of beaten tracks. No one who has

strayed from their devious zigzags will dispute the state

ment.

Within its small compass it rises in a tumult of ranges from 700 to 28,000 feet. In a two hours' scramble one can descend from Alpine gentians to tropical bamboos. The higher altitudes are ice and rook, the lower a wilderness of forest ridges and precipitous gorges, with seldom a level space and barely room for a footpath by the side of their torrent-beds. It is a country for flying and leaping things, but surely never designed by Providence for human habitation. An adventurous race thought otherwise, and in process of time they cleared the forest in patches and compelled the hillsides to yield crops for their sustenance. But nature forces her invaders to keep within the within the confines of their own handiwork. In the forest, unless the traveller is prepared to cleave his own way, he must keep to the beaten tracks, and these are kept open only by constant use. Beyond the Beyond the forest-limit every inch of the ground is cultivated, so here too he must follow the path. Cart roads there are none except the tail end of the military road that forces a reluctant passage up the Teesta

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gorge from Siliguri to Gantok. Sikhim has no use for wheeled vehicles. Bhutia ponies for those with means and their own sturdy legs for the rest are the only means of locomotion. Bridle-paths or coolietracks are the wayfarer's option, and every inhabited hillside is lined with their angular courses.

The lover of wild country who prefers to travel in comfort and to sleep with a roof over his head will find the lower valleys of Sikhim a deleotable land to loiter through. The bridle-paths are good: he will saunter downhill and ride up; and he will find habitable rest-houses set at easy stages. He will travel through primeval forest and jungle and traverse a dozen belts of vegetation where the familiar and the strange are mingled in attractive confusion. Daily, if he chooses his weather wisely, he will gaze upon a stupendous panorama of unconquered snow peaks and rook buttresses

which is nowhere equalled in the wide world. Everywhere the domestic marches with the elemental. The jungle ends abruptly in a patch of maize or a terraced rice-field. rice-field. Between shoulders of dense black forest, tenanted by beasts of the wilds, there are green hillsides minutely parcelled into fields and dotted with picturesque homesteads. From a cultivated ridge the eye rises direct to a virgin

peak. Civilisation is a kindly thing in contrast with nature at her wildest.

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The day's march is full of human interest, for the paths are few and the travellers many, and the Sikhimese are a friendly folk. There are three races: the settler from Nepal, a plain practical man and a good husbandman; the soft featured and feckless Lepcha; and the Bhutia, improvident and untidy and illfavoured of face, but a merry and a picturesque fellow. The women are of a pronounced but cheerful ugliness, and, with their apple cheeks and laughing eyes and black neatly plaited hair, not unattractive. One meets them at every turn of the path, busy with the daily round or resting on a steep ascent or trudging to the weekly bazar, every one with a load of some kind strapped across the forehead. There are foreigners too, for these are the traderoutes from across the mountains. By these paths comes the simple produce of the Nepalese valleys. By these comes the merchandise of Tibet-wool, hides, and yaktails. It comes on droves of jangling mules. A Tibetan is in nominal charge, but his authority is delegated to a mule-leader, betasselled to show its rank, which strides ahead of the drove, full of conscious command. The human attendant strolls behind at his leisure, his loose gown thrown off to the waist: a stout fellow, always ready to grin and pass the time of day, but

clearly out of his element in
the soft air of the foot-hills.
Signs of the people's faith are
everywhere, a shrine, a bunch
of prayer - flags, a whirling
prayer - wheel, a deorali or
votive cairn crowning every
ridge, and here and there a
monastery of one of the many
sects of Lamaism. A bare-
headed red-robed lama with
his circle of beads is a common
object of the road. He will
stop to converse, but he is an
unsatisfactory person to dis-
cuss his theology with.
is hazy and obscure, and in
the array of gods and saints
and demons that he marshals
forth the Lord Buddha is an
inconspicuous figure. An old
French missionary once told
me that during thirty years
of work in Eastern Tibet he
heard the name of Buddha
mentioned once.

He

At every cross-road one finds a bazar. On the weekly market-day it is thronged with hill-folk come to buy and sell their wares, to borrow money, and to hear the news of the great world. Its permanent residents are few. There is the inevitable tea-shop. One never fails to find customers making a satisfying meal of greasy chapattis and potent tea, for no hillman will willingly pass a tea - shop by, as every traveller knows who has mislaid his syce or arrived at his destination before his coolies. at- coolies. And there is the still more inevitable cloth - shop of the money - lender. He comes from Marwar in Central India, and he is always to be found squatting in his shop, an in

congruous figure with turban cocked Marwari-wise over his ear, shivering over accounts which his victims know nothing of, and only he can unravel. He supplies the cultivator with cloth at exorbitant prices, he lends him money at anything from 30 to 100 per cent, he finances his crops, and buys them at less than half their market-price. The valuable crops of the hills are grown solely for his benefit. He is a paradoxical creature, for he is the greatest curse of the hills, and yet for the vast majority he alone makes existence possible. The only thing to be said for him is, that he is a sportsman of a rudimentary kind, for he takes many risks cheerfully. And when he has amassed enough lakhs of rupees he will return to his own country, and doubtless make peace with his with his conscience by building a temple in his native village.

Given reasonable weather, the traveller on the bridlepaths of lower Sikhim will not be disappointed. But there is one piece of advice which a wise man will accept-he will take a pony. For the valleys are deep and steamily hot at the bottom; the angle of the hillsides drives from the perspiring pedestrian's mind all thought and appreciation, save of the inordinate length and steepness of the way; and the leeches of Sikhim are of Sikhim are legion, and incredibly agile and penetrating.

If the traveller is more ambitious, if his eyes are towards the snows and glaciers,

still he must be content to follow the made track. Between inhabited Sikhim and her snows lie many forestgrown ranges and valleys, and though his object be nothing less than the conquest of Kangohenjunga itself, he has no choice but to accept the sheep as his guide. Where the bridle - paths end the droveroads begin. The word brings a vision of grassy loanings that meander through homely Scots country, or a purple hillside with a green strip athwart it half overgrown with heather, where the bleating of sheep and the cry of the whaup and the grouse make kindly music in the ear. The Sikhim droveroad is a sterner thing, seldom more than a single sheep-track. The path, where it exists, is a foot broad; frequently it disappears altogether, and reappears as a few foot-marked boulders on a scree or a low archway through forest. It keeps to the ridge tops, climbing steeply up the side of precipices, plunging down chasms, and often involving a piece of quite respectable rock-climbing, for the Himalayan sheep is a mountaineer that takes the line of most resistance. But it means an open line in a blind country, and it leads to the very heart of the snows.

It was on a perfect day in late September that we started from Darjeeling, a party of three officials on a short eighteen days' leave. It had been a year of exceptional wetness even for Darjeeling. But here at last we thought was the

light. rest-house

end of the rains, and there the country changes. One was every indication of that leaves the foot-hills behind and spell of fair weather which we all semblance of tropical forest. had a right to expect. The Coarse grass and a profusion sky was clear save for the white of tiny flowers take the place fair-weather clouds that hung of undergrowth, and pine-trees over Kangchenjunga, and we and rhododendron and birch took the road with cheerful give the country a more homely hearts. Our coolies, twenty look. From Sandakphu to stout Nepali sharpas, with a Phallut the journey is twelve sirdar and a cook, had gone undulating miles of pure deahead to Phallut, a rest-house light. The top of the ridge is fifty miles from Darjeeling, set open country, banks of grass at the point where Nepal, Sik- and flowers border the road, him, and British India meet. We and the trees run close up to it reckoned it two double marches, from below. The vegetation is two days of luxurious travelling wholly Himalayan, but one is with good ponies and glorious continually reminded of familiar weather and rest-houses and places. A glen studded with log-fires. The tourist road runs solitary pines recalls the Highalong the knife - edge of the lands. A stretch of bent grass, ridge that divides Nepal from a tumbling burn, a little bog, the Darjeeling district. On and some solemn sheep on the the south one looks down over sky-line is a ridge of Border the gently sloping valleys of moorland, and a passing veil of Nepal to the dull coloured mist that clouds the snows plains of Hindustan stretching assists the illusion. Then one dead flat into shimmering traverses a succession of firspace, scarred by the sandy clad knolls and picturesque courses of the Kosi and the clearings intersected by watered Mahanuddy and the far-off glades strewn with fir - cones Teesta. To the north the eye that take one straight to the ranges over ridge upon ridge Black Forest. Flower-covered of green - black forest, a sea slopes in yellow and white and rolling in waves of symmetrical purple are English grass-land. trees till it breaks against the The last green ascent to Phallut wall of the Himalayas. Now might be taken from Tweeddale, the path runs clear, and one and in its gullies one might has a noble sense of height hope to find heather and and space and room; now it bracken and to hear the whirr plunges into a forest valley, of the startled blackcock. It giant trees, and dense under- is all in keeping with this land growth. It is a companion- of contrasts. Our 12,000-feet able road, alive with coolies ridge is bathed in softest sunfrom Nepal carrying their light; on one side the ravines loads to the thriving little are filled with the black clouds markets of Simana Busti and and billowing mist of a storm Jor Pokri. that has passed, and on the At Sandakphu the face of other the eyes are caught

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sharply up to 28,000 feet of dazzling snow.

India makes a specialty of her sunsets. The charm of the East lies in them. After the dust and glare of a drab day she wraps the world in delicate colours and bathes it in the softest after-glow, that brings peace to the soul. I have looked on her sunsets and admired in every corner of the land-on her great rivers, in the jungle, amongst steamy ricefields, in open spacious plains, and on her plateaus. All of them pale before that sunset above Phallut. A picture shall not be attempted of the sky and the floating wisps of cloud, the stormy ravines of the afternoon, now peaceful valleys full of dark purple mist melting gently down to the far-away plains, the shafts of coloured light dividing the farther valleys, night below and twilight above, the interplay of colour between sky and forest and snow and cloud. The whole noble line of snows lay open. To the west the mass of Everest and his attendant peaks, eighty miles off yet dominating the nearer snows; Jannu and Kabru and Kangchenjunga, rugged and massive and layered with great slabs of snow; the delicate cone of Pandim; Jubonu and Narsing. We stood coldly till the last tinge of after-glow faded from the brow of Kangchenjunga and left the world a chilly thing of black and gray. We had a premonition of a break in the weather. The Singlela ridge, where lay our path of the morrow, looked terribly cold

and inhospitable. We turned towards Darjeeling, where a line of festal light twinkled and glimmered cheerily across the valleys. Then with a faint feeling of regret we sought the smoky warmth of our last bungalow.

Next morning it was blowing a bitter hurricane. We bade a reluctant farewell to the ponies and took the road

on foot. At the

shrine on Singlela the coolies hung prayer-flags and threw rice in the air and crooned strange prayers, committing us to the care of I know not what strange gods. At Chiabanjan we left the tourist road and struck up a sheep-path to the Singlela ridge. The start was not encouraging. We scrambled for half an hour through low forest up the rude beginnings of a precipitous track, all boulders and tree-roots and black slime. Thumping hearts and gasping breath warned us to take the heights easy at first, and we were glad to rest in a shepherd's mat hut.

They are strange people these nomad shepherds of the Himalayas. The care of sheep is every where a solitary and an arduous life, but the utter loneliness of these men must far surpass that of the rest of their kind. In the spring, when the weather grows hot, they leave the valleys of Nepal and carry their flocks to the heights. They move from pasture to pasture, their shelter a rough covering of matting and brushwood, and their bed a couch of juniper and scented rhododendron. So they live through

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