roads 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 t