ALL night long the Jumna purred in their ears, rolling over the stones at the bottom of the shady hill, whereon the Raj had built a travellers’ rest. Looking out through the dewy branches in the morning, they saw the Doon lying under its mists at their feet, with the ragged Siwalliks on the other side—already they had begun to climb. Already, too, there was the mountain scent in the air—that smell of wet mossy rock and ferns and running streams and vigour—and this, as they set forth upon the Himalayas, with their faces turned upwards, took possession of their senses and made them altogether joyous. The Rajpore charger sniffed the wind with his Roman nose as copiously as circumstances would permit, and snapped viciously at young Browne’s trousers with his retreating under-lip. The Rajpore charger must have been at least twelve hands high, and fat out of all proportion. His syce and proprietor, Boophal—probably thirteen years old, wearing a ragged cloth jacket, a dhoty, and an expression of precocious iniquity, was very proud of him. The syce attached to Helen’s pony was visibly abased by the contrast, and Helen herself declared loudly against the injustice of being expected to keep up under the circumstances. Mrs. Browne’s mount had only one idea of going, and that was to imitate the gait of her distinguished friend in front at a considerable distance to the rear; and there is no doubt that it must have been trying invariably to come up puffing, to the reproaches of a waiting lord, complacent in his saddle. “If you could ride behind for awhile and beat it,” suggested Helen; “it doesn’t seem to mind me.” But young Browne thought that was quite impossible. There was one thing they might do, though—at Saia they might get her a spur! “George!” cried she, “do you think I would use a spur?—horrid, cruel thing, that you never can tell when it’s going in!” with ungrammatical emotion. “But we might change ponies for a bit, if you like.”

“We might,” said young Browne, reflectively, “but I don’t think that I should feel justified in putting you on this one, my dear; his rage and fury with his nose are awful.”

“But, George, I should like to ride beside you!”

“Not more than I should like to have you, dear. But I think, since I can’t have that pleasure, what a satisfaction I take in the knowledge that you are safe. Do you feel disposed to trot?”

“I do,” returned Mrs. Browne, with plaintive emphasis; “but you’ll have to start, please. What is the matter with this animal?”

The Diagram was neighing—long, shrill neighs of presagement, with her ears cocked forward. “Something’s coming,” said young Browne. “DÂk-wallahata!”^[137] remarked Boophal. A faint jingling on the far side of the nearest curve; the dÂk-wallah had rounded it, and was upon them, at a short, steady, unrelenting trot. The dÂk-wallah, all in khaki, had charge of Her Majesty’s mails. There was no time for a salaam. He wore bells at his waist for premonition, and a spear over his shoulder for defence. These hills were full of janwas^[138] without special respect for Her Majesty’s mails. On he went, jingling faint and fainter, bearing the news of the mountains down into the valleys, a pleasant primitive figure of the pleasant primitive East. Young Browne liked him particularly. “What a decent way of earning one’s living!” said he.

The hills began to round out nobly before them now. The road took great sweeps and curves, always penetrating and climbing, and a low stone wall made its appearance running along the outer edge. Over the wall they looked down upon a hurrying river and tree-tops; but the hill-sides towered straight up beside them, lost in sarl, and oak, and mosses, and shadows. They had climbed a very little way. The stillness seemed to grow with the sunshine. Only now and then a jungle-fowl stirred, or a hoo-poe cried, or they heard the trickling of a tiny stream that made its ferny way down the face of the rock to the road. Underneath the warm air lay always the cool scent; strange flowers bloomed in it, but did not change it; it was the goodly smell of the mountains, and Helen, respiring it, declared that it was the first time her nose had been the slightest pleasure to her in India. They turned to look back—the hills had grown up around them and shut them in; they were upon the solitary, engirdling road, with its low stone parapet below unknown heights, above unknown depths, insisting always upwards round the nearer masses to hills that were greater, further, bluer. It was the little parapet, Helen decided, that made it look so lonely. It must have taken quantities of people to build the little parapet along such mighty curves, and now they had all gone away down the road, and it seemed as if none of them would ever come back.

After the dÂk-wallah the jogi^[139] with his matted hair and furtive eyes. He asked nothing of the Brownes, the jogi, he extracted pice from his own people, for the good of their souls; the souls of the Brownes were past paying for; besides, it was so unlikely that a sahib would pay. And after the jogi came a score of black, long-haired, long-horned buffaloes, and a man seated upon an ass driving them. The buffaloes had evidently never seen anything approaching a Browne before, for they all with one accord stood quite still when they came within twenty yards of these two, and stared with the stolidly resentful surprise that never strikes one as an affectation in a buffalo. There were so very many buffaloes and so very few Brownes and so little room for any of them that the situation was awkward. “Keep close behind me and stick to the inside,” young Browne enjoined his lady. “They have been known to charge at things they don’t understand, but they take a good while to make up their minds.”

“Do let’s try to squeeze past before they make them up,” said Helen nervously; but as the Brownes circumspectly advanced each of the small syces ran out from behind his pony’s heels, and laying hold of the buffaloes by any horn, ear, or tail that came nearest, jostled them intrepidly out of the way. And there was a deeper humiliation to come. As they took their right of way at a trot with what dignity they might, a buffalo calf, a highly idiotic baby bull, overcome by the dazzling appearance of the Rajpore charger, turned round and trotted after him and would not be denied. In vain young Browne smote him upon the nose, in vain he who sat upon the ass abused with a loud voice the ancestors of all buffaloes, the little bull fixed upon the charger a look which said, “Entreat me not to leave thee,” and lumbered steadfastly alongside. Already the little bull’s mamma, smelling desertion from the rear, had looked round inquiringly—she was in process of turning—she was after them horns down, tail straight out, and she was coming fast! There was very little time for reflection, but it occurred irresistibly to both the Brownes that the little bull’s mamma would not be likely to put the blame upon the little bull. There was nothing for it but flight, therefore, and they fled; promiscuous and fast, for even the ponies appeared to understand that it was an unpleasant thing to be pursued by an enraged female buffalo for the restitution of maternal rights. First the flying Brownes, neck and neck exhorting each other to calmness, then the bleating calf that chased the flying Brownes, then the snorting cow that chased the bleating calf, and, finally, he upon the ass who chased them all, with shouts and brayings to wake the mountainside. It was a scene for the imperishable plate of a Kodak: there was hardly time to take it with the imagination. As his ideal departed from him the calf fell back into the hands, as it were, of his mother and his master; and young Browne, glancing behind, declared with relief that they were both licking him.

They stopped to rest, to consume quantities of bread and butter and hard-boiled eggs, to ask milk of an out-cropping village. Milk was plentiful in the village, cool creamy buffaloes’ milk, and the price was small, but from what vessel should the sahib drink it? All the round brass bowls that held it were sacred to the feeding of themselves, sacred to personalities worth about four pice each; and the lips of a sahib might not defile them. The outcast sahib bought a new little earthen pot for a pice, breaking it solemnly on a stone when they had finished; and even mixed with the taste of fired mud the buffaloes’ milk was ambrosial.

On they went and up, the trees shelved further down below and grew scantier above; upon the heights that rose before them there seemed to be none at all. Down where the river was evening had fallen, and all the hills behind stood in purple, but a little white cluster still shone sunlit in a notch above them. Boophal pointed it out. “Tin cos,”^[140] said Boophal. They hastened on at that, all six of them; they rounded a last flank, rattled over a bridge with a foaming torrent underneath, and found themselves clinging, with several fowls, oxen, and people, to the side of the gorge the torrent made. The dÂk-bungalow sat on a ledge a hundred feet or so further up, and the Brownes felt this to be excessive. They climbed it, however, and entered into peace at the top. There was a khansamah and two long chairs, there would be dinner. The Diagram, unsaddled and fed, folded herself up like a chest of drawers for repose; but the charger roamed up and down seeking something to kick, and all night long at intervals they heard him chewing in imagination the cud of the buffalo calf, neighing, yawning, biting his under-lip.

Next day they saw what the creeping road had conquered, and what it had yet to conquer. It was no longer question of climbing the great hills, they were amongst the summits, they walked upon the heights, behind them slope after outlying slope rose up and barred the way that they had come; and yet the parapeted road, with its endless loops and curves insisted upward, and the little military slabs that stood by the mountainside told them that they had still eighteen, seventeen, sixteen miles to follow it before they came to Chakrata, whence they should see the Snows. Helen found it difficult to believe that the next turn would not disclose them, that they were not lying fair and shining beyond that brown mountain before her to the left—it was such a prodigious mountain, it must be the last. But always the belting road sloped upward and disappeared again, always behind the prodigious brown mountain rose a more prodigious brown mountain still. They had astounding, soul-stretching views, these Brownes, but always around and behind them; before them rose ever the bulk of a single mountain, and the line of the climbing girdling road.

When God gave men tongues, he never dreamed that they would want to talk about the Himalayas; there are consequently no words in the world to do it with. It is given to some of us, as it was given to these Brownes, thus to creep and to climb up into the heart of them, to look down over their awful verges and out upon the immensity of their slopes, to be solitary in the stupendous surging, heaving mountain-sea that stands mute and vast here upon the edge of the plains of India. Afterward these people have more privacy than the rest of the world, for they have once been quite alone in it, with perhaps a near boulder and a dragon-fly. And their privacy is the more complete because there is no password to let another in—language will not compass it. So they either babble foolishly, or are silent.

The Brownes, in the fulness of their hearts, babbled foolishly. They wondered whether the white speck near the top of the mountain across the ravine was a cow or a house, and in either case how it held on. They wondered what the curious blood-red crop could be, that lay in little square patches far below them on the lower slopes where people had tiny farms. They wondered how cold it was up there in the winter—it was jolly cold now when you faced the wind. They found ox-eyed daisies and other Christian flowers growing in clefts of the rock, and they gathered these rejoicing. They implored each other to “keep to the inside” in places where the low stone wall had been washed away, and neither of them dared to look over. And they had an adventure which to this day Mrs. Browne relates as blood-curdling.

It was in rounding an old sunny corner in silent disappointment at again failing to find Chakrata. Young Browne, riding first, noticed a loose pebble rattle down the side of the rock. Mrs. Browne insists that she did not notice the pebble, and I don’t know that it is important to her evidence that she should. But she certainly noticed the leopard, so carefully that she never will be quite sure it wasn’t a tiger. She saw it rise from its four legs from a ledge of rock above young Browne’s head and look at young Browne. Mrs. Browne is naturally unable to give anyone an accurate idea of her emotion during the instant that followed, but she was perfectly certain that it did not occur to young Browne to transfix the animal with his eye, and he had nothing else. Neither it did, but the situation did not find Mr. Browne entirely without presence of mind notwithstanding. Raising his whip in a threatening manner Mr. Browne said “Shoo!” and whatever may have been the value of that expletive in Mr. Browne’s mouth under ordinary circumstances, in Mrs. Browne’s opinion it saved his life on that occasion. For without even an answering growl the leopard turned and trotted into the thicket quickly, as if she had forgotten something.

“Did you see that, Helen?” inquired her husband, turning in his saddle.

“I sh-should think I did?” exclaimed Mrs. Browne. “W-w-w-wait for me, George!” And as the Diagram came up alongside, young Browne received several tearful embraces, chiefly upon his arm, in the presence of the syces. “I told you you ought to have a g-g-gun, darling, and you wouldn’t be advised,” Mrs. Browne reproached him hysterically. “It’s all very well to laugh, but thin-thin-think of what might have been!”

“It’s awful to think of what might have been if I had had a gun,” said young Browne solemnly. “In the excitement of the moment I should have been certain to let it go off, and then she would have been down on us, sure. They hate guns awfully. Oh, we may be thankful I hadn’t a gun!”