Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - XXIII. Steamboating On the Ganges—Life on the River—The Greatest Business Firm in the World—Sceneries—Temples—Serampoor—Boat Races—An Excursion to the Himalayas—Darjieling and Himalaya Railroad—Tea Plantations—Darjieling—Llamas—View from the Mountains
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IS 233.2 Story of an Emigrant.
ters, the train with its load of humanity rolls awray up
hills and mountains and across awful chasms, up, up, up;
hour after hour, with a grade of one to eighteen and
twenty-cight, 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 to
vV-er above the clouds. A loose stone rolling down, a
broken rail, or a derailment would immediately hurl the iron
horse writh 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 awray 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,
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