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Darjeeling Panorama
from Tiger Hill. From "India Land of the Black Pagoda" by Lowell Thomas
1930
Dawn on the Arabian
Desert has been described as waking in the heart of an opal; the snow-capped
volcanoes and glaciers breaking off into Resurrection Bay on the Alaskan
coast are among the most awe-inspiring works of Nature; and for dramatic
suddenness the terrific Grand Canyon of the Colorado is unsurpassed
on earth; but the high Himalayas stand alone, above all the wonders
of the world, above all the things of beauty and terror on this planet.
DarjeelingÕs panorama from Tiger Hill, courtesy of Das Studios, Darjeeling.
Click to see a larger version of this image.
Although the magic
of the great mountains is indescribable, yet every man who sees the
Himalayas from the Vale of Kashmir or from Tiger Hill in northern Bengal,
feels that he must bear witness to this white wonder that has been unveiled
before him and that has taken him, perhaps for a moment only, above
the cares and crampings of his normal world.
For an hour we
have been sitting on a moss-covered rock on the northwest slope of Tiger
Hill facing mighty Kinchinjunga and the great white giants of ice and
rock that bar the way to central Asia, the home of sages, the cradle
of the human race. Although we are nine thousand feet above the plain
behind us, we are nearly twenty thousand feet below the mightiest mountains
in the world that tower in mid-heaven before us. Across the valley,
which drops four thousand feet, rise the guardians of Tibet, with Kinchinjunga,
their monarch, standing before that land of mystery, the realm of the
Dalia Llama. Below us, to the left and just out of sight, is the road
to Lhasa, the road we one day hope to travel. And there also lie the
mountains of Nepal and Katmandu, the forbidden capital of the maharajah
of Nepal. Directly in front of us is the flowery land of Sikkim, paradise
or botanists. At the farthest end of Sikkim we can just see, like a
dent in the frosting of a wedding cake, the Jelap-la, the ice covered
pass into Tibet. Behind us stretch Bengal, the valley of the Ganges,
and the torrid and teeming plains of India.
For days we have
been living in soft white clouds, and for hours on end we have been
swept by rains that seemed to threaten to remove our bungalow from Senchal
Hill to the colossal chasm below Darjeeling. But this afternoon a wind
from the direction of Mount Everest blew the monsoon mist out of our
eyes and cleared the sky so that instead of seeing a few yards our sight
suddenly extended for a hundred miles or more.
Below it is still
raining and clouds are tumbling in the valley between us and Tibet,
but here the horizon sweeps an arc of a thousand miles from the great
hills to the great plains.
Kinchinjunga is
just across the valley only forty miles away. It piles up in the sky
to twenty-eight thousand feet, only a thousand feet less than Everest,
and it is perhaps the most grandest mountain of the earth. On either
side are Kabru and Jannu, rising to twenty-four thousand and twenty-five
thousand feet respectively.
As we sit here
on our rock on Tiger Hill watching the clouds go trouping past Kinchinjunga,
it reminds us of a military review with Kinchinjunga the king, and the
billowy white masses a mighty cosmic army parading before our eyes.
See how that big cloud rolls up and completely shuts off Kinchinjunga,
just as Foch once overshadowed Poincare when he marched along the Elysees
at the head of his poilus.
As the sun drops
over the ice rim of Tibet, the snowy summits of the Himalayas are tipped
with gold like the 'tyi' of a Burmese pagoda. And behind us the sky
is brilliant with colour over the plains over Bengal. Here is a high
horizon of the vividest ultramarine that looks as if the seas had surged
over India as they did over Atlantis of old. The mountains against the
sunset seem as though some TitanÕs furnace had opened behind them.
Far to the northward
the 'Alpine glow' lights three far-distant peaks. The middle one, inconspicuous
owing to the distance, and looking like an ice cream cone, is Everest.
Somewhere on that slope in imagination we see a camp, a handful of plucky
Englishmen smoking their pipes and around them coolies cooking dinner,
yaks chewing the cud. May the God of the Holy Mountain look with favour
on their next attempt!
An hour ago it
was dark in this valley at the foot of Tiger Hill, and now that the
sunset above has faded, the blue haze rising out of the forest becomes
deeper and deeper. It is a dim, indistinct world down there. Far down
in the valley below us the little toy houses of the tea-planters become
vaguer and vaguer, and the dwellings of Darjeeling clinging to the mountainside
melt into the wreaths of azure that creep over the layers of the landscape.
In the high heaven
there is a riot of colour - alizarine, turquoise, violet, crimson Š
where the setting sun touches the rain-clouds with his glory. A giant
with fist out-stretched has passed across the west. And now a gigantic
dragon has stretched his length across a hundred miles of Himalayas.
A mass of vapor, like thick-flocked wool, rises out of the valley, a
white wall through which nothing can be seen. Then slowly, with twisting
laminae, like the iris of a lens, an aperture forms in the white wall
and Kinchinjunga is framed in the oval.
The sun is still
shining there on that high and haughty crest where the winds of the
world are sweeping. A flamboyant flame burns about the crest like a
streak of fire, like a cometÕs tail. It is the banner cloud, the radiance
of driven snow caught by the last rays of a sun that has left the world
of men but still lingers among the great white brethren of Tibet.
But how futile
we stand before the Himalayas, with our cameras and our stylographs
and our stammered words of praise! What are our adjectives and ideas?
The Himalayas are utterly above the contriving of our language. Only
the soul of man may know them. Our puny minds can make some guess of
the time when they began, may see some glimmering of the day that will
come when they shall vanish in the ruin of the world; yet we know nothing,
can imagine nothing, so wonderful is their presence of glory with the
sunsets on their stainless snows. They stand, for us creatures of a
day, from eternity to eternity. They began befre our race began, and
before they crumble in cataclysmic night the eyes of our posterity will
have closed. Nor tongue nor pen may tell their wonder. We can only look.
We have reached a boarderland, a zero, an infinity Š something that
exists but that we cannot express. Throned above all the world and crowned
with the glory of the sunset, the Himalayas are indeed the kings of
earth.
It is bitter cold
on Tiger Hill, and it is dark now, and it will soon be dinner-time.
A bath, a dinner, a fire, await us at Senchal Bungalow. And so we take
our leave of the Himalayas to-night, going down without turning our
backs on his seraphic majesty, Kinchinjunga.
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