But Darjeeling was unique in my experience; for I had visited no other Himalayan Hill Station. A town on the mountain-tops, a town of pretty villas, large hotels, clubs and churches, of big English shops with plate-glass windows, of jumbled native bazaars thronged with thousands of men and women of a dozen different hill races. Broad, well-kept roads run along the ridges and up and down the steep hill-sides, lined with lovely gardens, in which stand fascinating European houses like the villas of Trouville and Deauville under the shade of giant orchid-clad trees. English ladies in smart frocks go by in rickshaws or reclining in chairs carried on the shoulders of strong coolies. Officers and civilians on well-groomed ponies trot past groups of sturdy-limbed Bhuttias or rosy-cheeked Lepcha women hung with turquoise and silver ornaments. British soldiers in khaki stop to chat with small, cheery Gurkha policemen by the roadside. Pig-tailed Sikkimese and Tibetan lamas fingering their rosaries stare into the plate-glass windows of shops that would not be out of place in Oxford Street and which display to the bewildered heathen Paris fashions or the latest pattern of coloured shirts and smart waistcoats. The central point of Darjeeling is the cross roads at the Chaurasta. Here on one side the ground rises a thousand feet or more to the summit of Jalapahar, crowded with barracks and European bungalows. To the other the hill-sides slope steeply away covered with tea gardens. Along the ridge the road runs by a trim English Church in pretty grounds, the straggling building of the Amusement Club with tennis courts terraced one above the other, and on to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal's summer residence set in a lovely park. To the north the ground falls sharply another thousand feet; and one looks down on the roofs of the bungalows and British Infantry Barracks of Lebong, with its race-course around the polo ground and the rifle-range, seeming like a toy station set out far beneath. Below, the deep valley; and beyond it rises a jumble of mountains on mountains in bewildering profusion. And at dawn and evening above the clouds hangs high in air the long line of the Everlasting Snows. Over it towers Kinchinjunga, twenty-eight thousand feet high, with its jagged white peaks gleaming in the morning or pink-flushed in the rosy light of sunset; forty miles away, yet so clear and distinct that the beholder imagines he would be able to see a man on it, if some climber could scale its untrodden heights.