Our first view of the Himalayas—Across India in a troop train—A scattered regiment—An elephant-haunted railway—Kinchinjunga—The great Terai Jungle—Rajabhatkawa—In the days of Warren Hastings—Hillmen—Roving Chinese—We arrive at Buxa Road—Relieved officers—An undesirable outpost—March through the forest—The hills—A mountain road—Lovely scenery—Buxa Duar—A lonely Station—The labours of an Indian Army officer—Varied work—The frontier of Bhutan—A gate of India—A Himalayan paradise—The fort—Intrusive monkeys—The cantonment—The Picquet Towers—The bazaar—The cemetery—Forgotten graves—Tragedies of loneliness—From Bhutan to the sea.
Against the blue sky to the north lay a dark blur that, as our troop train ran on through the level plains of Eastern Bengal, rose ever higher and took shape—the distant line of the Himalayas. Around us the restful though tame scenery of the little Cooch Behar State. The chess-board pattern of mud-banked rice fields, long groves of the graceful feathery bamboo, here and there a tiny hamlet of palm-thatched huts—on their low roofs great sprawling green creepers with white blotches that look like skulls but are only ripe melons. But the dark outlines of the distant mountains drew my gaze and brought the heads of my sepoys out of the carriage windows to stare at them.
For somewhere on the face of those hills was Buxa Duar, the little fort that was to be our home for the next two years.
For four days my detachment of two hundred men of the 120th Rajputana Infantry had been whirled across India from west to east towards it. From Baroda we had come—Baroda with its military cantonment set in an English-like park, its vast native city with the gaily painted houses and narrow streets where the Gaikwar's Cavalry rode with laced jackets and slung pelisses like the Hussars of old, and his sentries mounted guard over gold and silver cannons in a dingy backyard. Where in low rooms, set out in glass cases, as in a cheap draper's shop, were the famous pearl-embroidered carpets and gorgeous jewels of the State, worth a king's ransom.
Four days of travel over the plains of India with their closely cultivated fields, mud-walled villages, stony hills and stretches of scrub jungle, where an occasional jackal slunk away from the train or an antelope paused in its bounding flight to look back at the strange iron monster. Across the sacred Ganges where Allahabad lies at its junction with the River Jumna. The regiment was on its way to garrison widely separated posts in outlying parts of the Indian Empire and neighbouring countries. Two companies had already gone to be divided between Chumbi in Tibet and Gantok in the dependent State of Sikkim, and to furnish the guard to our Agent at Gyantse.
The month was December; and they had started in August to cross the sixteen-thousand-feet high passes in the Himalayas before the winter snows blocked them. The regimental headquarters, with four companies, was on its way to embark on the steamers which would convey them a fourteen days' journey on the giant rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra to Dibrugarh and Sadiya in Assam.
At Benares my two companies had parted from the rest and entered another troop train which carried us into Eastern Bengal.
Every day for three or four hours our trains had halted at some little wayside station to enable the men to get out, make their cooking-places, and prepare their food for the day. The previous night my detachment had detrained at Gitaldaha, where we had to change again on to a narrow gauge railway, two feet six inches in width, which would take us through Cooch Behar to our destination. The railway officials informed me that we must stay in the station all night, as the trains on this line ran only by daylight. I asked the reason of this.
"They cannot go by night on account of the wild animals," was the reply.
"The wild animals?" I echoed in surprise.