FROM THE TERRACE you hear the peal of wind chimes, the lowing of a cow now and then, the muffled voices of occasional passersby on the path below, and, if you’re not imagining it, a soft rustling from the feathery Japanese pines, beyond the garden bordered by budding azaleas. From the garden the ground slopes sharply away, yielding an unimpeded view of wooded hills at the other side of a steep valley. Sprays of blossoms — white, lavender, and violet, the petals of potted primroses or “powder plants” as they’re called here — enliven the terrace. A stray wisp of coal smoke dilutes the purity of the cool mountain air, but you do not complain after the foulness of Calcutta. Here, 7,000 feet above the vast Bengal plain, you feel as if you have stumbled into Shangri-la.
This is Darjeeling, a town on a lower spur of the eastern Himalayas, the Clemenses’ next stop after Calcutta. It was one of the so-called hill stations of the British Raj, a retreat from the baking, polluted, pullulating cities of the plains, a place where the sick might find health, where debilitated colonials might regain their strength, where children whose parents were unwilling or unable to send them to Britain attended school, and where the provincial administration worked during the summer months. Today rich Indians and foreign tourists enjoy the amenities established by the British, who left behind them hotels, clubs, country houses, churches, and a tradition of cosseting the visitor.
The Clemenses, who left Calcutta at four-thirty in the afternoon, on Friday, February 14, 1896, traveled to Darjeeling in style. Mr. Barclay, the railroad’s chief of traffic south of the Ganges, reserved a special parlor car for them, with an attached car for their servants, and accompanied them part of the way. After an hour, tea was served, while two servants stood behind their chairs. In another three hours they reached the Ganges, where they left the train. In a letter to her youngest daughter, Jean, Mrs. Clemens wrote how she wished that Jean could have seen the Ganges station. “Natives in all the brilliant and picturesque costumes that one could imagine, standing about the station area all the way down to the boat.” As guests of the railroad they dined “most sumptuously” on the ferry during their one-hour crossing of the river, at that point more than one mile wide. Mr. Holmes, the railroad’s chief of traffic north of the Ganges, who had joined them at dinner on the ferry, saw them into their sleeping car, which took them to Siliguri, the railhead for Darjeeling.
“Up with the sun” the next day, wrote Clemens in Following the Equator. “The plain is perfectly level, and seems to stretch away and away and away, dimming and softening, to the uttermost bounds of nowhere.” He noted the countless villages. He mentioned the naked men and boys plowing the fields, and the absence of women there, unlike European countries in which he remembered grandmothers pulling plows in harness with an ox. “Come,” he wrote in his journal, “let us introduce Austrian, Bavarian and French civilization, and Christianity, right away.” The adoption of Christianity seems not to have been necessary; in today’s India you see women working not only in fields but also in road gangs and on construction sites.
That morning the Clemenses found “a dainty breakfast-table” spread for them, as Mrs. Clemens told Jean. Their host had left them by this time, she wrote, but his orders had been carried out so that “every thing was most delightfully arranged for us. Then up the mountain we came in the pleasant open car.”
They ascended to Darjeeling on the narrrow-gauge, miniature railway whose toy train consisted, in Clemens’s words, of “little canvas-sheltered cars that skimmed along within a foot of the ground and seemed to be going fifty miles an hour when they were really making about twenty.” The train required eight or nine hours to travel forty miles, so steep was the climb and so frequent the loops and switchbacks, with the train sometimes passing above itself. The coaches, more than three times the width of the narrow track, often seemed to be passing over thin air, as the train ran close to horrifyingly deep and sheer chasms.
Before beginning its ascent, the train stopped at “a little wooden coop of a station just within the curtain of the somber jungle,” Clemens reported in Following the Equator. The royal Bengal tiger, he continued, inhabited the area in great force. “It was there that I had my first tiger-hunt. I killed thirteen.” A few days later, as he was preparing to return to the plains, he wrote a letter to Charles Henry Webb, who had met Clemens years before in Nevada and who had published Mark Twain’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Clemens informed Webb that in Darjeeling he had “met a man who conversed with a man who knows the man who saw a tiger come out of the jungle yesterday and eat a friend of his who had just put on his breech-clout and was starting out to pay calls. We expect to see that tiger to-day, for we have to pass right by that spot, and he will probably want some more.”
Little more than one week later, about five hundred miles west of Calcutta, a tiger mauled an English sportsman, T H. Butler, whose servants were reported to have acted improperly at the time. The incident created a sensation. Butler had wounded the tiger and set out the next day to finish it off, despite the pleas of his companion, who was confined to the camp with swollen feet and who said that, judging from the scant traces of blood, the animal had been only lightly wounded. Butler hunted his prey for two days, setting out from camp each morning with some bearers and a headman who held Butler’s rifle. (“Why,” asked The Times of India, “will people following dangerous quarry give the gun into the hands of a coolie.”) On the second day, Butler confronted the tiger, took his rifle, and, according to the head bearer, told his men to run away, which they promptly did, without first shouting to frighten the animal. Butler shot but missed the tiger, which rushed at him and mauled him. When Butler reached for the revolver at his side, the motion frightened the tiger, which fled. After the men returned to find Butler still alive, they brought him back to camp, from which he was taken to a hospital, where he died. “It is well-known here,” reported The Times of India, “that there was a spare gun with the natives with Mr. Butler; and yet no effort of any sort was made on their part at rescue; and a European life was thus sacrificed to their pusillanimity!”
Even without a tiger hunt, Clemens found the ascent to Darjeeling “so wild and interesting and exciting and enchanting that it ought to take a week.” He enjoyed the sinuous track that wound around and under the towering cliffs, he was impressed by the variety and lushness of the vegetation, and he was fascinated by the men and women walking up and down the mountain, particularly the Gurkhas or Nepalese, whom he saw here for the first time. Finally he could look down upon the plains of India, “level as a floor, shimmering with heat.” At 7,400 feet he reached Ghoom and then descended a few hundred feet to Darjeeling, where he arrived at about four-thirty in the afternoon on Saturday, February 15, twenty-four hours after leaving Calcutta, about 375 miles to the south.
The party rode to their hotel in dandies, rented from the railway company for a small sum. A dandy was a box chair, which Clemens called an “open coffin.” Four strong men would place the horizontal cross-poles supporting the conveyance on their shoulders and trot to their destination, while their swaying passenger clutched a bar in front. In those days luggage followed on the backs of female porters, who supported their loads by a strap around the forehead.
You can no longer follow the Clemenses’ railroad journey from Calcutta to Siliguri; the route has been changed to avoid traveling through Bangladesh, and the journey ends not at Siliguri but at its sister town, New Jalpaiguri, two or three miles away. Your train crosses a long bridge over the Ganges, obviating a ferry ride. The best train accommodation we could find was on the Kanchenjunga Express, named after one of the great Himalayan peaks visible from Darjeeling. The long train provided a single air-conditioned coach, whose dirty, crazed windows made objects outside look as if they were under water. The window nearest us had trapped between its inner and outer panes a small mouse.
Trying not to think of the special parlor car in which the Clemenses began their journey, we rode backwards in an uncompartmentalized coach on a bench with a bunk above us, facing another couple who sat on a bench with a bunk above them. If the four of us had wanted to sleep, we could have drawn a curtain between our four beds and the aisle, but it was unnecessary to do so, since we reached New Jalpaiguri an hour or so after dark. The whole journey took about thirteen hours, just a few hours shorter than the Clemenses’ journey one hundred years ago.
The Clemenses stayed at the Woodlands Hotel, then the town’s leading inn, a low wooden building below Auckland Road, now Gandhi Road. A local resident remembers taking Nepali lessons there in the 1940s, before it burned down. On its site stands Circuit House, a rest house for officers of the West Bengal civil service. During the Raj, the Woodlands did not accept Indian guests.
Clemens’s At Home began at nine-thirty, about five hours after his arrival. The “fairly good house” included planters from outlying tea plantations. Clemens told his audience that Darjeeling had greatly impressed him and that the Himalayan Railway was “the most remarkable forty miles of railroad in the world.” He had been told, he said, that Darjeeling would be cold. “No fewer than nine people in Calcutta advised me to put on specially warm clothes. I have taken their advice and am now wearing the whole nine suits.”
He probably performed at the old Town Hall, an annex of the Amusement Club on Observatory Hill, then the hub of British social life in Darjeeling. The Town Hall, a venue for dances, public meetings, and amateur theatricals, was located between the club’s lawn tennis ground and its covered tennis courts, more or less on the site of the present Gymkhana Club, founded early in the century. You can obtain a temporary membership and play tennis there still.
The next day, a Sunday, the main market day for the hill peoples of the region, Clemens watched the pageant of “swarthy strange tribes” on their way to the bazaar, streaming for hours “from their far homes in the Himalayas.” Later the Clemenses ventured into the bazaar to see “that novel congress of the wild peoples.”
Clemens’s view of the hill peoples as exotic seems relatively benign at a time in which racial characterizations and rankings were common. An Englishman who lived in Darjeeling during the early years of the twentieth century quoted Milton to imply that the hill peoples were “a herd confused / a miscellaneous rabble.” With the same degree of certainty with which he advised travelers to sit on the left-hand side of the toy train when ascending to Darjeeling, the author divided the dominant Nepali hill peoples into three physiognomic categories, Types A, B, and C, with A the most intelligent, B the most enterprising, and C the hardiest and most martial.
Then as now, Darjeeling’s population reflected its position as a border region, about sixty miles from Tibet and even closer to Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim (which India annexed in 1975). The Lepcha and Bhutia peoples whom the British found in the early nineteenth century were soon engulfed by Nepali-speaking peoples, the Gurkhas, who came to work the tea plantations. More recently Tibetan refugees have enlarged the local Tibetan population.
Nepali speakers still form the majority of the people, and a Nepali nationalist movement controls the local council. That movement, backed by the Communist Party, fomented widespread riots and engaged in guerrilla warfare about ten years ago in support of an autonomous Gurkhaland. Hundreds lost their lives, thousands lost their homes, a rebel paramilitary unit occupied the Gymkhana Club’s indoor skating rink, and tourism vanished. A compromise in 1988, whereby the local council received a considerable degree of autonomy, permitted the revival of tourism and the return of an uneasy version of normalcy, although as a legacy of the troubles no public life exists at night. While nationalist graffiti continue to salute a nonexistent Gurkhaland, the local council has done little to improve the town. Electricity, water, and fuel remain in short supply. “Yes,” a town official told us, “the infrastructure is crumbling but the people are happier because they are free.” He predicted renewed violence as the Gurkhas pursue independence.
Tea, of course, is Darjeeling’s most famous export, so desired by the world that only a fraction of the product labeled Darjeeling is grown near Darjeeling; visitors come here not for the tea, however, but for the superb views of the Himalayas. The best viewing seasons are spring and fall, but even then a visitor can wait for days before the clouds and mists dissipate to reveal the stupendous peaks, about forty miles away. The Clemenses were out of season as far as viewing was concerned. Both on Saturday, the day they arrived, and on Sunday the mountains were obscured, although Clemens wrote that it would have been worth traveling to Darjeeling just to see the “wild peoples” there.
On Sunday, Clemens spent a few hours at the club, where, according to the Darjeeling Standard, he had a drink “and was genial and entertaining and kept the billiard-room so jolly that though it was full of members, no one could play.” That night the club hosted him at dinner. “In every town and city in India,” Clemens explained in Following the Equator, “the gentlemen of the British civil and military service have a club; sometimes it is a palatial one, always it is pleasant and homelike. The hotels are not always as good as they might be, and the stranger who has access to the Club is grateful for his privilege and knows how to value it.” To this he might have added that in each town and city in India the club was a central symbol of imperial rule: only white men belonged to it, with the exception of a local Muslim or Hindu ruler, a nawab or rajah, if he wanted to join. It has been suggested that the exclusion of Indians was based not on racial snobbery but on the Indians’ inferior rank, but this argument is weakened by the observation that membership was open to men who were neither in the civil nor the military service. In fact, the club in Darjeeling was established by planters and called the Planters Club until 1908, when it became the Darjeeling Club. Planters and officers attached to the military and civil services were entitled to membership; other Europeans were readily admitted “if properly vouched for.” The club, a long, low wooden building with verandas on each of its two levels, still operates in the same structure, overlooking what was once Commercial Row and is now Nehru Road. The changed composition of its members is reflected in the names of its secretaries: Major E. Carew Hunt in 1896, Major S. K. Sobti one hundred years later. You can take a temporary membership and stay there, if you like, and for a daily fee you can play on the club’s surviving billiards table. The club appears to be struggling: the library’s newest book was probably first shelved fifty years ago; the public rooms are gloomy and dilapidated; and some of the upstairs bedrooms are in deplorable condition, although others have been remodeled, improving their comfort at the expense of their period charm. The plants on the downstairs veranda, however, are flourishing.
On Monday morning, the Clemenses’ last day in Darjeeling, the fogs and clouds cleared long enough to reveal the peaks of the Himalayan massif. After arising at five-thirty, Mrs. Clemens, Clara, Smythe, and a male acquaintance set out to watch the mountaintops reflect the sunrise, while Clemens, clad in a dressing gown, wrapped a few blankets around his shoulders, lit a pipe, and viewed the mountains from a window inside his hotel. In Following the Equator he wrote that “my party rode away to a distant point where Kinchinjunga and Mount Everest show up best.” This sounds like Tiger Hill, seven miles away, then as now a popular observation point. From there you can glimpse Mount Everest, if only as an unimpressive knob at the end of a spectacular chain. But it is unlikely that the party went to Tiger Hill. Accompanied by the male acquaintance and Clara on horseback, Mrs. Clemens traveled in a mountain rickshaw, pulled by two men and pushed by one, while Smythe walked. A fourteen-mile round trip is improbably long for a mountain rickshaw, and the walk in one direction requires two hours. Since they rose at five-thirty, they could not have gone far before the sun came up at about six o’clock. They probably traveled to the highest point of Darjeeling, Observatory Hill, or to an observation point on the Mall, which circles the hill.
The mountain view from Darjeeling is unrivaled in terms of the number and height and closeness of visible peaks, with distances from Darjeeling ranging from thirty-two to forty-five miles. Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, rises to more than 28,000 feet, seven other mountains soar to at least 22,000 feet, and none of the remaining peaks that you see along the great snowy range is lower than 15,000 feet. At daybreak the Clemenses watched the peaks glimmer pink and orange in the reflected glory of the sunrise.
After breakfast, at which they sat as close to the fire as possible on that cold day, the Clemenses left for the train station, accompanied by some members of the club. Clemens informed them that he “had intended to tell the many people in Calcutta who had told him of the grandeur of the snows that he had seen them, whether he had or not, and he was glad to be saved the pain of telling a lie.”
The Clemenses boarded the toy train for its first and highest stop, Ghoom, about five miles away. From the region of “eternal snow,” as Clemens later told Rogers, they began their descent to “perpetual hellfire,” thirty-five miles away and 7,400 feet below, in a six-seated, canvas-covered handcar. Propelled by gravity, it sped so close to the ground that it gave its passengers the illusion that they were flying down a crooked toboggan slide. Rounding crags and skirting precipices, shedding their rugs and furs as they descended, they left Darjeeling behind. Clemens wrote of their corkscrew descent: “For rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday-trip that aproaches the bird-flight down the Himalayas in a hand-car.” It was, he said, “the most enjoyable day I have spent in the earth.”