From Calcutta we traveled about three hundred and seventy miles northward to Darjeeling. We wished to see the Himalayas. A most tortuous narrow-gage railway lifted us gradually to a height of seven thousand feet. And there we had the unusual privilege of seeing the sunrise tipping with rosy light the snowy peak of Kinchinjinga, twenty-eight thousand feet high and forty-six miles away. Mt. Everest, a hundred miles distant, is twenty-nine thousand feet high, but from Darjeeling is invisible. Kinchinjinga is nearly twice as high as Mont Blanc, and its glittering mass is a spectacle never to be forgotten. Curiously enough, upon the summit of Observatory Hill, from which we gained our view, the immigrant Tibetans had erected their shrine, and long, inscribed paper and muslin streamers, enclosing a large quadrangle, gave to the winds their prayers. No idol was to be seen. The worship seems to be far more spiritual than that of the Hindus. Nature seems to have taught that secluded race of Tibetans a more primitive religion than modern Hinduism. It is a religion mixed with Buddhism, but preserving the earlier view of a divinity in natural objects, which Hinduism has almost wholly outgrown. Our next point of investigation was Benares, "the holy city," the Mecca and Jerusalem of the Hindus. It is a hotbed of heathen enthusiasm and of blinded devotion. The sacred river Ganges flows by, with tier upon tier of temples rising from its steep banks--such a congestion of religious edifices that one might almost doubt whether they had left room for any but priests to live. Every day, hundreds of pilgrims troop through its streets and throng these temples, presenting their flowers and their offerings, making their sacrifices, and listening submissively to the instructions and threatenings of the priests. Every temple has its sacred animals, to be sacrificed or worshiped. The "Golden Temple," so-named, is covered with gold-leaf from its spire to its base. The noisy crowd in its corridors, the noisome odors of its sanctuaries, the adjurations of its priests and their evident aim to turn religion into financial gain, disgust the Christian traveler, while they show him how deeply rooted in the human heart is this towering system of idolatry and superstition.