Smythe - Camp Six

The Environs of Everest

Calcutta is hot even in February. Though sorry to part from many hospitable friends, I was glad to begin the last stage of my journey from England to Darjeeling.

It was a stuffy night to begin with in the Darjeeling Mail, and ravenous mosquitoes interfered with my slumbers, but towards dawn the temperature fell and cool, refreshing airs rushed in at the window.

As the train neared Siliguri the sky lightened with a quick rush of rosy tints and little pools of water opened calm eyes in the paddy fields of the Bengal plain.

I peered from the window into the dim hill-filled north, and there, high up in the sky, I saw a tiny point of golden light. During the few seconds that it was visible before a curve took it from sight it grew larger. It was the summit of Kangchenjunga, nearly one hundred miles distant.

At Siliguri, the foothills meet the plain, and the hillman the plainsman. Half of those on the platform were languid Bengalis, the other half energetic, slant-eyed, broad-faced, high-cheeked Tibetans; smooth-skinned, quiet-mannered Lepchas from Sikkim, and tough little Sherpas from Nepal, their brows furrowed as though from the strain of staring into great distances, and their eyebrows puckered from the snow-glare of the passes. Traders, beggars, Lama pilgrims, rickshaw wallahs from Darjeeling and little Nepali women from the tea plantations, with gay-coloured blouses and cone-shaped wicker baskets on their backs; all were cheerful, all ready to show their teeth in a broad grin.

I breakfasted, then ascended to Darjeeling by the world-renowned Himalayan Railway. So wide are the carriages that they seem likely to over-balance on the narrow-gauge line. A brave little engine draws the train, but it would not succeed in climbing the steeper gradients without two men stationed on the front to pour sand on the rails.

First along the plain, fussed the train, then into the sub-tropical forests that extend for scores of miles along the foothills of the Himalayas. One minute, we were on the level, the next we were climbing steeply uphill.

After the placid, less secretive beauties of English woodlands, these Himalayan forests are strangely impressive. Sunlight rarely penetrates their dense foliage, beneath which all manner of rank shrubs struggle despairingly upwards towards the sunlight; giant creepers embrace the moss-clad trees in an octopus-like grip, and epiphytic ferns, proof of the humid climate, hang from the branches in lank green tendrils, so that the traveller fancies himself walking on an ocean floor amid pendent masses of seaweed. In each great tree dwells a colony of birds and insects, and there is a constant whirring and humming as though countless sewing machines and sawmills were being worked by invisible hands.

Pantheists who can see only beauty and gentility in nature should visit a tropical or sub-tropical forest. Grossness and strife are the keynotes, and the predominant motif is death and the fear of death. Much has been written of the gentle beauties of the English countryside, but where are the poets of the jungle?

The train stopped to pick up a red-haired Irishman, who told me that he had been sitting up all night for a tiger, but without success. He also related the providential escape of a friend from an infuriated leopard. The would-be leopard killer fired one barrel of his gun he was using a double-barrelled shotgun firing soft-nosed bullets and missed. The other cartridge misfired. The next moment the leopard was on him. He ducked as it sprang and somehow he was a powerful man threw the beast over his shoulder. The leopard was so surprised at this all in treatment that it made off, leaving the hunter with a badly mauled arm which he subsequently lost through sepsis. The story ended romantically; he married his nurse.