In the early morning we reached Siliguri where we had to change to the Himalayan Railway. A crowd of sleepy passengers descended and entered the refreshment-room in search of breakfast, while their servants gathered their luggage together. Then we took our seats in the tiny open carriages of the small train which climbs the steep slopes of the mighty mountains. At first it plunged into forest between huge trees clothed with orchids, walled in by dense undergrowth; for we were in the Terai again. Then it wound among the jungle-clad foot-hills and climbed ever higher, while the forest grew thinner and sparser. Anon it emerged on the sides of the open bare mountains; and we looked down on the dark belt of trees and the plains spread like a map below us. We could trace for miles the winding course of the Tista, the wide river that flows down through the hills from Sikkim. Here and there we passed by long stretches of tea gardens. In one place the railway forms a complete circle, looping the loop; so that, with a long train, the engine would be crossing over a bridge while the last carriage was still under it. Beside the line ran the mountain road, by which heavily laden coolies toiled between the villages of rough wooden huts. At last the greatest elevation was reached at the small station of Goom; and the train ran down for a thousand feet and ended its journey in Darjeeling. Mark Twain was enraptured by the beauties and marvels of engineering of this Himalayan Railway. But to me it seemed far less wonderful and lovely than the lines over the Rocky Mountains of his own country. I have crossed them by the Denver and Rio Grande route, where in broad Pullmans and big-windowed observation-cars we sat in comfort, and at an elevation of ten thousand feet gazed at the snow-clad peaks towering above us or, lower down in the deep gorges, strove to see the tops of the sheer, two-thousand feet high walls of the Grand Canyon, painted in brilliant colours by the lavish hand of Nature.