Reminiscences: The Story of an Emigrant

by Hans Mattson

In the river, midway between these cities, a gigantic government barge was anchored. On this occasion it was covered with canvas, and served as a dining room where a tiffin, or lunch, for four hundred persons was served. Our steamers anchored, and we sat down at the sumptuous tables. A band of forty pieces from a Sepoy regiment garrisoned at Barrackpoor struck up an English march, the champagne bottles popped, and all was life and joy. After lunch we witnessed six different boat races, all between Englishmen, and, the prizes having been awarded, the whole company walked on foot about a mile through a fine park to the railway station, whence a special train carried the excursionists back to Calcutta.

After a summer of eight months in the Bengal lowlands with a constant temperature of 90° to 100° Fahrenheit in the shade, fresh breezes and cool air become luxuries more keenly enjoyed than those who live in a more temperate climate can conceive. To benefit by both I made a short journey in October, 1882, to the celebrated Himalaya mountains, among which the city of Darjieling is situated. The train on the Bengal railroad carried us about three hundred miles in a northerly direction through a level lowland teeming with gardens, palm groves and rice fields, to Siligori, at the foot of the mountains, where we arrived in the morning at sunrise. Having enjoyed a good breakfast and a bottle of Norwegian export beer at the railway eating house, we were transferred to a train on the Darjieling & Himalaya railroad to be carried up seven thousand feet high in a distance of forty-two miles.

This mountain railroad is so different from all other railroads that it deserves a special description. It is narrow gauged in the fullest sense of the word, the distance between the rails being only two feet. The cars are very small and low, and the wheels are about twelve inches in diameter. The car is ten feet long and six feet wide, and contains four seats, each of which accommodates four persons; it is open on the sides so that passengers can get on and off easily and have an open view. The locomotive is no larger than the cars, but powerful enough to pull ten or twelve of them up the mountain at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour. Nowhere is the track straight even for a distance of a couple of hundred yards, but it winds right and left in the most fantastic manner, and reminded me strikingly of the lines described in one of the old country dances.

The signal is given, the pigmy locomotive puffs and sputters, the train with its load of humanity rolls away up hills and mountains and across awful chasms, up, up, up; hour after hour, with a grade of one to eighteen and twenty-eight, or on an average of twenty-three feet. It winds along the rugged mountain side, over awful chasms, and with such short curves that one’s hair stands on end when looking down or up the steep cliffs, the summits of which tower above the clouds. A loose stone rolling down, a broken rail, or a derailment would immediately hurl the iron horse with its cars and human lives thousands of feet down to the bottom of the abyss, and reduce the whole to an unrecognizable wreck. Beautiful trees, grass, flowers, creeping plants adorn hills and vales except in the ravines and cliffs, where foaming creeks and cataracts have torn away the vegetation by tumultuously tossing themselves from rock to rock, from cliff to cliff, from valley to valley, gradually uniting in the rivers that continually feed the mighty Ganges.

The track follows a twenty-five-foot-wide driveway, the most part of which is hewn out of the solid rock, and on this highway may be seen the mountaineers from Nepaul and Thibet driving large numbers of pack animals (ponies and cattle) carrying products of Europe and America into and beyond the mountains to the peoples of northern Asia. Here and there on the green hills are the best tea plantations of India. These long, low, white buildings are the residences and factories of the planters, and close by are the dwellings of the native laborers, consisting of long rows of thatched huts, and in terraces along the steep hills are endless rows of tea bushes, among which laborers dressed in picturesque costumes of gay colors are busy picking tea, advancing in irregular lines—resembling the skirmish lines of an army. This picture is at first seen against the horizon, so far up that the men can scarcely be distinguished from the bushes, and a couple of hours later the same picture may be viewed far down in a deep valley.

After awhile at the head of a long valley appear lofty, white objects whose summits rise far up above the mist and the clouds; it is the highest peaks of the Himalaya mountains, from sixty to one hundred miles distant. Thus the journey is continued up the mountains until the train finally stops at Darjieling, which is one of the most noteworthy places in the world. It is a sanitarium, and the summer residence of the government of Bengal, and during the hot season makes a favorite resort for many of the Hindoo nobles and princes as well as Europeans. The city has a few thousand inhabitants, the majority of whom are Thibetan and Nepaul mountaineers. There we see the Christian church, the Mohammedan mosque and the Hindoo temple in close proximity to each other, and on the streets one may often meet Catholic monks carrying the crucifix, and Llamas or Thibetan priests in long, brown felt mantles, turning their praying-wheel, which consists of an artistically made machine of silver, in which are engraved the following words: “Rum mahnee padme hang,” which means, “Hail thee, jewel and lotus flower,” or “Glory to God.”

PALACE AND TEMPLE IN THE HIMALAYAS.

Residences, churches, hotels and all public and private buildings lie in a semi-circle on the western slope of one of the mountains, offering a very fine picture. Excellent roads are built in zigzag form up and down over hills and mountains. There are scarcely any carriages but a kind of palanquin called dandies, and small ponies which are so sure-footed that they can climb up and down the mountains like goats. Both men and women ride these or are carried by three strong bearers from Thibet. Darjieling is elevated eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and at this place black clouds may often be seen sweeping along the western side far below one’s feet. The air is so clear, fresh and salubrious that it seems to infuse new strength, vitality and almost new life. It impels either to activity or to sleep; it is impossible to sit still or be mentally inactive. The view of the landscape below is claimed to be the most beautiful in the whole world. Beneath the terraces on which we walk are seen smiling valleys, one below another, away down far into the plains of Bengal, variegated by rivers, forests, cities and many-colored fields, and far away to the distant north against the blue horizon, one great mountain rises above and beyond another, capped with eternal crowns of snow high up among the restless clouds—twenty thousand feet higher than Darjieling, and twenty-nine thousand feet above the sea,—over five miles in height.

The loftiest peaks are Kinchinjunga forty-five miles, and Mount Everest, sixty miles distant from Darjieling. It is claimed that these peaks can be seen for a distance of three hundred miles in clear weather. There these mighty giants stand clad in snowy garbs, like sentinels at the portals of infinite space, seemingly belonging more to heaven than to earth. No wonder that the Hindoos look at them with solemn awe, for cold and insensible to beauty and grandeur must he be, who does not, at this sight, feel his own littleness and the inconceivable greatness of the creator.