EARLY NEXT MORNING THEY WOKE to find that they had come to the very foot of the Himalayas. The air was cool and pleasant after the heat of the plains. Above the grey haze of the plains, beyond foothills hidden in early mist, rose line upon line of purple mountains, and towering above all were the three shining white peaks of the sacred mountain Kanchenjunga.
Now, announced Alex, came the best part of the journey. They had an early breakfast in the Siliguri station restaurant, and then it was time to board the little train that would carry them into the mountains on its steep circuitous track. The Darjeeling-Himalayan railway, with its spinach-green engine and bulging coal bunkers, its miniature compartments, was for all the world like a toy train in a children’s book. From their first-class carriage, Sophie could look back and see the third-class passengers perched precariously on window ledges, chattering with their neighbours as they smoked their leaf-wrapped Indian cigarettes. Then the whistle sounded. Steam hissed from the tall funnel, and with a sudden jerk of the engine they were on their way.
Their journey began through dense green walls of jungle; then, as they began their ascent, they climbed past stands of giant bamboo and forests of huge trees canopied with liana vines and hung with orchid blooms. They crept past tea plantations clinging to narrow mountain terraces and hillsides vivid with scarlet and yellow and purple rhododendron.
All that day the little engine crisscrossed and looped and zigzagged its way uphill, hugging rock walls or creeping stolidly along the edge of an abyss. At times the track was so steep that a coolie standing on a ledge in front of the engine had to sprinkle sand on the rails so that the wheels could grip. The strong, sweet, burnt-leaf smell of Indian cigarettes drifting from the third-class carriage mingled with steam billowing from the engine, and, as they climbed higher, with thick white mist.
Sophie gazed out, entranced. She revelled in the coolness of the mountain air, the brilliant green of the foliage with its paint-box splashes of colour; the breath-stopping glimpses down sheer precipices to the plains below. Most of all, she delighted in the wonderful oddity of this journey. Fearful of heights, she should have been nervous as they skirted the edges of cliffs where the ground plunged sheer away into shadowy chasms. Strangely, she was not. Their doll’s engine clung sturdily to its narrow rails; their track seemed safely anchored to solid rock.
“Do you like to imagine things, Sophie?” Like all of Alex’s questions, it was a serious one.
“I did when I was your age,” replied Sophie.
“Not now?”
“Sometimes.” But when, thought Sophie, was the last time she had dared to let herself imagine anything?
“When we go to Darjeeling,” said Alex, “I pretend our train is carrying us up into the sky, to a magic cloud kingdom.”
Sophie laughed. “Then we’ll imagine that together, and who knows — between the two of us, we might make it come true.”
They passed through a thick bank of fog and there for a moment was a dazzling sunlit view of Mount Kanchenjunga; then more tea gardens, and at last, mist-shrouded, came Ghoom — the highest railway station in the world, read Alex from the guidebook she had bought at Siliguri station. Finally, in fading light, they made the short looping, roundabout descent into Darjeeling.