It was early morning. The sun had newly risen, though not yet visible, and threw a flood of rosy light upon the gigantic snow-tipped pinnacles, causing them to glisten like polished white marble. The valley below, four or five thousand feet deep, was filled with an ocean of silvery clouds, which majestically rolled and rose upon the forest-clad sides of the great mountains as far as the limit of perpetual snow; and from this fleecy mass as a border towered aloft against an azure-hued sky the magnificent form of Kanchinjinga. For miles in each direction the thickly-wooded sub-hills were in sight, but all interest centred in the never-by-man-trodden peak before and above me. A dread and awful silence seemed to pervade the air, and the total absence of life or motion lent an almost supernatural glamour to the scene. For nearly two hours I sat as one entranced, until the sun gently lifted the clouds from the valleys, and as with a silver-wrought screen shut off from my eyes the most impressive sight they ever beheld. During this marvelous exhibition the "littleness of man" had been made very painfully lucid. Yet, perhaps, there is nothing so calculated to raise the thoughts, enlarge the mind or purify the heart as the contemplation of the sublime and beautiful in Nature. Kanchinjinga, properly speaking, consists of three peaks, which are sharp, serrated, precipitous, and apparently composed of solid rock from the snow-limit to the summit. Its immense height is not thoroughly appreciated by the traveler for two causes--its great distance (fifty miles "as the crow flies"), and the fact that the point of observation is itself one-fourth the height of the mountain. Had I risen earlier and ridden to Mount Senchal, fifteen hundred feet above Darjeeling, I _might_ have obtained a view of Mount Everest, which is nearly thirty thousand feet in perpendicular height above the sea (about five and a half miles), and is the supremest point upon our globe, while Mount Kanchinjinga, which until quite recently was supposed to be the higher of the two, is found to be of about eight hundred feet less altitude. Mount Everest is a single peak, a cone, and appears like a small white tent above the clouds, but in grandeur and sublimity it is excelled by Kanchinjinga. Well do the Himalaya Mountains bear out the meaning of their name--the "abode of snow"--for on their southern slopes in some places the snow-line descends to fourteen thousand feet. The mean elevation of this remarkable range is double that of the Alps, and many of its passes to the elevated table-lands of Central Asia are higher than the summit of Mont Blanc. Huge glaciers of smooth ice, though none so vast as those of the Alps, are numerous in parts of this stupendous mountain-chain, and even descend from the regions of perpetual snow to eleven thousand feet. Though the Andes of South America present a mountain-system twice the length of the Himalayas, still in respect to