uds from the
valleys, and as with a silver-wrought screen shut off from my eyes the
most impressive sight they ever beheld. During this marvelous exhibition
the "littleness of man" had been made very painfully lucid. Yet,
perhaps, there is nothing so calculated to raise the thoughts, enlarge
the mind or purify the heart as the contemplation of the sublime and
beautiful in Nature.

Kanchinjinga, properly speaking, consists of three peaks, which are
sharp, serrated, precipitous, and apparently composed of solid rock from
the snow-limit to the summit. Its immense height is not thoroughly
appreciated by the traveler for two causes--its great distance (fifty
miles "as the crow flies"), and the fact that the point of observation
is itself one-fourth the height of the mountain. Had I risen earlier and
ridden to Mount Senchal, fifteen hundred feet above Darjeeling, I
_might_ have obtained a view of Mount Everest, which is nearly thirty
thousand feet in perpendicular height above the sea (about five and a
half miles), and is the supremest point upon our globe, while Mount
Kanchinjinga, which until quite recently was supposed to be the higher
of the two, is found to be of about eight hundred feet less altitude.
Mount Everest is a single peak, a cone, and appears like a small white
tent above the clouds, but in grandeur and sublimity it is excelled by
Kanchinjinga. Well do the Himalaya Mountains bear out the meaning of
their name--the "abode of snow"--for on their southern slopes in some
places the snow-line descends to fourteen thousand feet. The mean
elevation of this remarkable range is double that of the Alps, and many
of its passes to the elevated table-lands of Central Asia are higher
than the summit of Mont Blanc. Huge glaciers of smooth ice, though none
so vast as those of the Alps, are numerous in parts of this stupendous
mountain-chain, and even descend from the regions of perpetual snow to
eleven thousand feet. Though the Andes of South America present a
mountain-system twice the length of the Himalayas, still in respect to
altitude the former are much surpassed by the latter. Mount Dwalaghiri
in Nepaul is of nearly the same height as Kanchinjinga: then, there are
two peaks which attain twenty-six thousand feet; four about twenty-four
thousand feet; and over twenty that reach an elevation exceeding twenty
thousand feet!

Leaving Darjeeling, I visited one of the large tea-gardens near the
terai at the foot of the hills