IF you have not entirely forgotten your geography you will know that against the eternal gold and blue of the Indian sky, across and across the middle of the land, there runs unevenly a high white line. You will remember it better, perhaps, as “the trend of the Himalayas,” and it may have a latter-day association in your mind with imprudent subalterns and middle-aged ladies who consume a great many chocolates and call each other “my dear girl.” Out here we never forget it for a single instant; it survives the boundaries of our native counties, and replaces in our imaginations every height in Europe. We call it “The Snows,” and the name is as little presumptuous as any other. It is very far off, and the more like heaven for that reason; moreover, that way Simla lies, which is heaven’s outer portal, full of knights and angels. They are distant and imperturbable, the Snows, we can only gaze and wonder and descend again to earth; we have only the globe-trotter’s word for it that they do not belong to another world. It is the brown outer ranges that we climb, the heaving brown outer ranges that stand between the Holy of Holies and the eye of the profane, the unbeliever, the alien. Because these brown outer ranges are such very big mountains it is our pleasure to call them “The Hills”—if you talked of spending three months in the mountains it would not be clear that you didn’t mean Switzerland. Here we perch our hill-stations, here once in every year or two we grow fat and well-liking, here on the brink of a literal precipice the callow subalterns and the blasÉ married ladies flirt.

It was by the merest accident, which I helped to precipitate, that the Brownes went to the Hills in September. A planter in the Doon^[124] had committed suicide—acute dyspepsia—whose business was in our hands, and somebody had to go to see about it. The junior partner wanted to go, but the junior partner had just come out from England weighing fourteen stone, and I got Mr. Perth Macintyre to persuade him that it was absolutely necessary to spend two months of the rains in Calcutta if he wished to recover his figure. Thus to the Brownes also came the hope of the clean breath of the Hills. I went myself down to Howrah station after dinner to add my blessing to their luggage, but the train was gone. A fat baboo of Bengal told me so, with a wreath of marigolds round his neck. I thought, looking at him, how glad they must be to have turned their faces toward a country where men eat millet and chapattis,^[125] and are lean.

Kasi was there too. Kasi travelled “intermediate,” that is to say sitting on the floor, quite comfortably, in a wooden box, iron-barred down the sides to let in light and air. Before the train started Kasi had unrolled all the rugs and pillows, had made ready soap and towels and brushes, and had left the sahib who had been very troublesome all day, and the memsahib who had already unjustly accused him of having forgotten seven things, with nothing to do but to go to bed and to rise again. Then he returned to his own place, where his own kind buzzed about him with flat baskets of sticky brown balls and fried sweetmeats to sell. Kasi regarded them indifferently and bought nothing; the kinship was only skin-deep, the lime-marks upon their foreheads were different, he could not eat from their hands. Secretly, when the shadow of none fell upon it he took from a little brass box his betel solace, then as the train whistled he unwound the ten yards of his turban, wrapped his red chuddar^[126] about him, and disposed himself on the floor to dream of the profit there might be when the sahib took a journey.

In the morning a dry coolness blew in at the windows. It had been raining, it would rain again; but here in Behar the earth had been needy, and her face had grown lovely with the slaking of her great thirst. The rain had washed the air and the sun had dried it; to these dwellers in Calcutta it seemed that they were already on the heights. All night long they had been going through the rice country, where the pale green shoots stood knee-deep in the glistening water for miles around, now they rolled through a land where the crops waved tall with sprouting ears—maize and millet and wheat. The little villages were almost lost in them. High over the grain the ryot’s sons kept watch and ward against the thieving parrots in little open thatched houses stuck on the top of a long pole or in the fork of a dead tree. They were perched up there to be safe from the leopard’s spring; the leopards like a maize-fed ryot’s son. They could give warning, too, if the zemindar’s servant came that way, to ask an extra tax for the wedding expenses of his master’s second daughter. The little villages seemed of kindly disposition; here was a precarious crop that wanted shade, and upon this field every man had set his bed, one beside another, so that it was covered. They were at ease, the little villages, the crops throve, there would be enough for the zemindar if they pretended to be very poor; nobody would starve that year, and perhaps Malita or Alanga would add a new silver bangle to her wedding portion.

The Brownes were too utterly poor for the railway restaurants. They brought a tiffin-basket. Young Browne designed the tiffin-basket, a Chinaman designed the price. It was as big as a small trunk; it would just go under the seat. There was room in it for everything that has yet been thought of in connection with a civilized repast. I believe Mrs. Browne is now using it as a china and linen closet. It held ten rupees’ worth of tinned stores among other things, and a kerosene stove. Mrs. Browne filled the rest of it up economically with bread and butter and cold meat, and young Browne added as an after-thought half a dozen pints of champagne. It was a modest Anglo-Indian tiffin-basket, and they drew it forth with much joy in the morning, having the carriage to themselves. It was seven o’clock and the train had stopped. Servants were running about the platform with cups of tea and slices of toast for the chota hazri of people who hadn’t brought tiffin-baskets. “Just for curiosity, George,” said Helen, “ask how much they are charging?”

Young Browne, in the unconventionality of his pyjamas,^[127] leaned out of the window. “Hi, you!” he called, “dom kitna?”^[128]

“Aht anna, sahib!”

“Good gracious!” cried Mrs. Browne. “Eight annas for a cup of tea and two bits of toast! The tiffin-basket is a saving, dear!”

“Oh, it is!” responded Mr. Browne, “for the other meals. But now that I think of it, I want my chota hazri now, don’t you? Hi-ups kitmutgar! lao chota hazri and jeldi karo!”^[129]

“One could so easily boil the water, dear,” objected Mrs. Browne.

“For the other meals. But we can’t cook our chota hazri. Everything’s at the bottom. We shouldn’t get it ready till midnight. The fact is,” said young Browne decisively, “we ought to have brought a kitmutgar—that would have been a saving if you like!” And as the steaming tea came through the window and the price went out, “I don’t think it’s so very much,” said young Browne.

That is the way they began. The precise number and extent of the economies effected by the tiffin-basket will never be recorded, but I believe they drank the champagne.

I doubt either your information or your gratification at being told that they changed at Mogulsarai. Mogulsarai is on the map, but you will not find it there because you will not look—which I do not say censoriously; it is quite enough that Anglo-Indians should be obliged to remember the names of such places. They are curiously profane, with their crowded little roofs and their mosque-towers; and they are very hot. The Brownes’ train lay on a side-track baking, as they entered it, four coolies bearing the tiffin-basket. The place grilled almost silently, black and white and grey with converging railway lines encumbered with trucks; an engine moved about snorting painfully, and nearly naked men ran in and out under the carriages smiting the wheels. They rolled out of the place and on for an hour, then over the bridge of the Ganges and past some old fortifications, and out of the windows they saw Benares, Benares the impressively filthy, trailing her skirts and her sins in her great sacred river, but fair, very fair indeed, with the morning sunlight on the faces of all her gods, and the morning sky behind the minarets of Aurungzebe.

It was the middle of the night before they reached Lucknow, where they awoke thirsty. A wide, lighted, orderly station platform, railway guards walking about in white duck and gold buttons, a single dissipated-looking little subaltern promenading with his hands in his pockets. There was no ice, and young Browne sleepily abused the first railway official that passed the window. “A big station like this, and the ice allowed to run out in such weather! The thing ought to be reported.”

“It’s in weather the like o’ this, sir, that the ice diz run out,” suggested the guard. “Tickets, sir!”

Lucknow, with her tragedy still upon her lips, her rugged walls still gaping in the white moonlight up yonder, her graves still tenderly remembered—and the Brownes’ bitter complaint of Lucknow was that they found no ice there! Ah, little Brownes! I write this of you more in sorrow than in anger; for I know a soldier’s wife whose husband’s name you might have read graven on a Lucknow tablet in the moonlight that night, and when I remember all that she has told me, I find it grievous that you should even have been aware that there was no ice in Lucknow!

In the morning they were rolling through a lightsome country, all gay fields and gravelly river-beds, with billows of sunlit air coming in at the windows, an hour from Saharanpore. A blue hill stood like a cloud on the edge of the horizon, the Brownes descried it simultaneously and laughed aloud together. It was so long since they had seen any elevation greater than their own roof, or a palm-tree, or an umbrella. They got out at Saharanpore, and Kasi got out at Saharanpore, and the bundles and the boxes and the bags got out at Saharanpore. They were all as dirty as they could possibly be, but the people who did not get out at Saharanpore looked at them enviously, for they had the prospect of being dirtier still. Arrived at the place of the dÂk-bungalow, and the solace of unlimited ablutions, Mrs. Browne could not imagine in what respect she had ever found a dÂk-bungalow wanting. Could anything be more delightful than that they should have it entirely to themselves! Between her first dÂk-bungalow and this one Mrs. Browne had made steps towards the solitary Calcutta ideal. On this occasion she pulled down all the chicks,^[130] and told the solitary box-wallah who had outspread his wares in the veranda against her arrival to “Jao, jeldi!”

Here they tarried till the following day, when the blowing of a trumpet aroused them at what they considered an excessively early hour of the morning. It was their trumpet; they had bought the exclusive right to it for twelve hours. It belonged to the dÂk-gharry that was to take them from Saharanpore to Dehra, “a distance,” as any guide-book will tell you, of “forty-two miles.” If you could see a dÂk-gharry you would probably inquire with Mrs. Browne if there wasn’t any other way of going. There is no other way of going. There are large numbers of places in India to which there is no other way of going. And if one had answered you thus, you would have said that if you had known that you wouldn’t have come. Mrs. Browne said that when she saw the travelling-carriage of this Orient land of dreamy luxury, but she didn’t particularly mean it, and neither would you.

In appearance the Browne’s dÂk-gharry was a cross between a sun-bonnet and a blue hearse. This may be a little difficult to imagine; but I don’t appeal to your imagination, I state facts. It was the shape of a hearse, and you were supposed to lie down in it, which completed the suggestion. To counteract the gloomy apprehension of this idea, it was painted blue inside and out—distinctly a foncÉe blue. This superficial cheerfulness was accentuated by shutters in the back and sliding doors at the sides, and the whole thing was trimmed from the roof with canvas wings. The top would take as much luggage as the hold of a ship—a small ship. Inside there was nothing at all, and a place to put your feet. Kasi condoned this austerity with rugs and pillows, and took his seat beside the driver, with whom he conversed as affably as his superior social position would admit. The two Brownes were carefully extended inside like modern mummies; four native persons of ambiguous appearance and a persuasive odour fastened themselves on behind. The driver cracked his whip, and the two meek brown spotted down-trodden horses stood promptly upon their hind legs pawing the air. They came down in time, and then they began to back into the dÂk-bungalow dining-room. Dissuaded from this they walked across the road with the intention of putting themselves in the ditch; and finally, after a terrific expenditure of language on the part of the driver, they broke into a gallop, which brought each of the recumbent Brownes inside to a right angle by the action of some mechanical principle containing a very large element of alarm. This was not at all a remarkable demonstration. It is the invincible dustur of every animal in the dÂk-gharry business, and is perfectly understood, locally. The animals attached to the Brownes galloped their three miles and arrived reeking at the next dÂk-stable without another thought of anything but their business. In the meantime the local understanding spread to the Brownes, who specified it afterwards with liniment.

To this impetuous way of going it was a relief, Mrs. Browne told me afterwards, to hang one’s feet out of the door. The picturesque conduct of the fresh dÂk-ponies every three or four miles displayed novel forms of vice, interesting to the uninitiated. They bit and strove and kicked, and one of them attempted to get inside. Helen said it was very wearing to one’s nerves. But when they had accomplished the little earthquake of starting there were compensations. The road was green and shaded, as it would be in England; squirrels frisked from one trunk to another, silvery doves with burnished breasts cooed in the bamboo branches, and ever the gracious hills drew nearer and a little nearer.

“These are only the Siwalliks,” remarked young Browne, in a pause of their jubilant conversation. “Wait till you see the Himalayas on the other side! The Siwalliks are only rubble. They’re rapidly crumbling away.”

“If they were in England,” replied Mrs. Browne, watching the little topmost turrets grow greener, “we wouldn’t admit that they were rubble. And I don’t believe they’ll crumble away very soon.”

“In a few Æons,” returned Mr. Browne superiorly. “It won’t matter to us. We’re getting regularly up amongst them. This is the beginning of the pass.”

They had journeyed four hours and had come to a little white bungalow perched high upon the flank of the nearest hill. Here the khansamah had a red beard, and swore by it that the sahib had not forewarned him; how should there be beef and potatoes! Milk and moorghy might be, but eggs no—the eggs were a little bad.

“For that saying, son of the Prophet,” said young Browne, “backsheesh will be to you. In Bengal there is no true talk regarding eggs. And now hasten with the milk and the warmed moorghy curry of the traveller of yesterday, and dekko, Kasi, tiffin-basket, lao!”

Broad is the road that leads over the Mohun Pass, and beautiful are the summits that look down on it, but it cannot be climbed with the unaided strength of horses. It was dull driving but for the sunset behind the hills, when they put oxen on in the bad places; and still duller when the sulky, long-haired black buffaloes lent a leg; but there was a certain picturesqueness in being pulled by the three varieties of beasts at once, especially when a gang of road-coolies turned in and pushed behind.

They had always the trumpet, too, which enlivened the whole of that part of Asia. And wild white balsams grew high on the rocks, and naked little children, in blue necklaces, played about the road.

There was the blackness of a tunnel, and then the vision of a fair valley mightily walled in, with the softness of evening still in her face, and the smoke of her hearth-fires curling up to a purple sky. They rattled across a quarter of a mile of dry riverbed full of stones, and were in Dehra, Dehra Doon, where all the hedges drop pink rose-petals, and the bul-bul sings love songs in Persian, and the sahib lives in a little white house in a garden which is almost home.