[Sidenote: 32. On the Railway to Ootacamund.] [Sidenote: 33. The Same.] [Sidenote: 34. The Same.] [Sidenote: 35. The Same.] The railway from the east coast goes through the Gap of Coimbatore to the Malabar cities of Cochin and Calicut, and from this railway a mountain line has been constructed up into the Nilgiri heights. We have here a succession of striking views on this mountain line. It is a rack and pinion railway, up which the train is worked on the central rail. [Sidenote: 36. The Drug in the Nilgiri Hills.] There are magnificent landscapes at the edge of the Nilgiris, where the mountains descend abruptly to the plains. This view was taken from a point called Lady Canning’s seat. It shows the Drug, from the top of which prisoners of war used to be thrown, in the days of the tyranny of Hyder Ali and Tippu Sultan, the Mohammedan sovereigns of Mysore, of whom we shall hear more presently. [Sidenote: 37. Tea Plantation, Nilgiri Hills.] [Sidenote: 38. The Same.] [Sidenote: 39. Hill Tribe, Nilgiri Hills.] [Sidenote: 40. Toda People, near Ootacamund.] The vegetation of the heights is naturally different from that of the lowlands, and the cultivation of the Nilgiris is chiefly tea and cinchona, from the latter of which crops quinine is prepared. Amid the great forests of the slopes large game is numerous, such as sambur, or Indian elk, and tiger. Here also tribes of savage peoples have survived through all the centuries of history practically untouched by the civilization of the plains. One of these tribes, the smallest but the most interesting, are the Todas, who number less than a thousand, but have their own strange, unwritten language.