Richard Zacks - Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain’s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour

I n February 1896, Mark Twainpilot of the Mississippi River, whitewasher of American fenceswas just about to board a tiny six-seat open railroad car in the Himalayan mountains in India. He was circling the world with his wife and daughter, entertaining English-speaking audiences because he needed to make a lot of money in a hurry to pay off debts from bad investments.

International celebrities get perks, but the following perk seems almost too amazing to be true. The British higher-ups at the Darjeeling Himalayan Railwayan engineering marvel designed to transport tea from the steep slopeshad decided to let him use thirty-five miles of track as a personal roller coaster. Chill winds off the majestic snowy peaks ruffled the famous bushy eyebrows. He told a handful of tea plantation owners that he was glad the blanket of clouds had cleared so that he could see the worlds highest peaks because then he wouldnt have to lie about it. The night before, during his stage act, he had mentioned Americas first president. Think of it. George Washington could not lie, said Twain. Grown person, you knowcould not lie. Comes right out & says it. Seems to me Id a known enough to keep still about an infirmity like that.

The views of far-off snowcapped Himalayan mountains were dazzling and the drops were unquestionably fatal. An elephant had recently splattered its enormous guts after slipping off the Hill Cart Road, which paralleled the tracks.

Twain gazed over the edge at the track falling down sharply and corkscrewing in and out of crags and precipices, down, down, forever down. No seat belts are mentioned in any narrative. The author thought he might have heard a story about a prior lieutenant governors train jumping the track and hurling everyone off the mountainside. He shared the story. And even if that story wasnt true, that didnt mean that they were safe.

He was doing what many self-respecting fathers/husbands would do in this situation. He did his level best to scare his wife and daughter. The car could really jump the track, he told Livy and Clara. A pebble on the track, placed there by either accident or malice, at a sharp curve where one might strike it before the eye could discover it, could derail the car and fling it down into India.

Gravity would propel them downward; only a hand brake could slow them. They would race through four horizontal loops so steep that the train had to double back through tunnels. The Darjeeling Himalayan Express ran along slopes so nearly vertical that the engineers couldnt lay long winding curves but four times had to set the line in Z-shaped zigzags that required reversing directions. Twain and family would briefly be heading blindly backward and downward. To add to the thrill, the track was only two feet wide, which gave the six-foot-wide cars the sense of floating, not riding the rails.

By way of precaution, British officials sent another railcar ahead of Twain and his family.

[The danger] was for Mr. Pugh, inspector of a division of the Indian police, in whose company and protection we had come from Calcutta. He had seen long service as an artillery officer, was less nervous than I was, and so he was to go ahead of us in a pilot hand-car with a Ghurka and another native; and the plan was that when we should see his car jump over a precipice we must put on our brake and send for another pilot. It was a good arrangement.

The family wrapped themselves in fur blankets and shot down the mountain. At Agony Point, the curve radius was so tight that they truly expected to go flying. Halfway down, they rested, drinking Darjeeling tea at a mountainside chalet. They also saw a Tibetan dance play. They reboarded and plunged downward.

For rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird-flight down the Himalayas in a hand-car, wrote Twain. It has no fault, no blemish.

And he later judged that February day in India the single most enjoyable day of his entire yearlong, debt-paying trip.

The idea of Twain in India is discombobulating enough; the idea of Mississippi Mark telling purely American stories in the Himalayas is even more extraordinary. Robed priests squatted outside, spinning prayer wheels. Sherpa guides prepared for Everest treks. That weekend, Twains wife, Livy, wrote to their fifteen-year-old daughter:

Jean, darling, look on the map, and try to realize that we who belong to you are away up here in the Himalayas, on the border of Thibet. I cannot myself believe it can be true.

Twain, whom many pictured in a straw hat and corncob pipe, performed his stand-up routine onstage in a black evening suit. He never smiled. Never. Crowned king of deadpan. No props, no notes. He called it a reading, but it was really the greatest hits from his best books. And he memorized the whole ninety-minute show. He selected choice morsels such as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County or How I Escaped Being Killed in a Duel.