At an elevation of 6,000 feet we entered a thick cloud, and it shut out
the world and kept it shut out. We climbed 1,000 feet higher, then began
to descend, and presently got down to Darjeeling, which is 6,000 feet
above the level of the Plains.
We had passed many a mountain village on the way up, and seen some new
kinds of natives, among them many samples of the fighting Ghurkas. They
are not large men, but they are strong and resolute. There are no better
soldiers among Britain's native troops. And we had passed shoals of
their women climbing the forty miles of steep road from the valley to
their mountain homes, with tall baskets on their backs hitched to their
foreheads by a band, and containing a freightage weighing--I will not say
how many hundreds of pounds, for the sum is unbelievable. These were
young women, and they strode smartly along under these astonishing
burdens with the air of people out for a holiday. I was told that a
woman will carry a piano on her back all the way up the mountain; and
that more than once a woman had done it. If these were old women I
should regard the Ghurkas as no more civilized than the Europeans.
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