February 15 Saturday – Livy described a 9 a.m. breakfast set for them on the train [Feb. 16 to Jean]. Sam wrote of the trip to Darjeeling:

Up with the sun. A brilliant morning, and frosty. A double suit of flannels is found necessary. The plain is perfectly level, and seems to stretch away and away and away, dimming and softening, to the uttermost bounds of nowhere. What a soaring, strenuous, gushing fountain spray of delicate greenery a bunch of bamboo is! As far as the eye can reach, these grand vegetable geysers grace the view, their sproutings refined to steam by distance. And there are fields of bananas, with the sunshine glancing from the varnished surface of their drooping vast leaves. And there are frequent groves of palm….And everywhere through the soft morning vistas we glimpse the villages, the countless villages, the myriad villages, thatched, built of clean new matting, snuggling among grouped palms and sheaves of bamboo; villages, villages, no end of villages, not three hundred yards apart, and dozens and dozens of them in sight all the time; a mighty City, hundreds of miles long, hundreds of miles broad, made all of the villages, the biggest city in the earth, and as populous as a European kingdom. I have seen no such city as this before [FE ch LV 524-5].

From the breakfast station we started in a small 6-chaired car — canvas — & by & by came to the foot of the rise. Ascended the mountain — all curves — at apparently 100 m. an hour, but really it takes 7 or 8 h to climb the 40 m. to Darjeeling [Ahluwalia 15-16].

Parsons writes,

At Siliguri…they changed to one of the canvas-covered, six-passenger cars which hugged the two-foot-gauge rails of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway. For about seven miles they darted through rice fields and tea gardens to Sukna, where the 7,000 ascent began. The miniature train slowed to less than ten miles an hour as it passed through forest and wild botanical gardens, rounded countless goompties (zigzags), crept under cliffs, and edged along chasms. At 4864 feet they paused at Kurseong before climbing to Ghoom, the highest rail point (7407 feet), and dropping some hundreds of feet to the great ridge on which Darjeeling is scattered [“MT India” 88].

Clara Clemens recalled the trip to Darjeeling:

We were soon in a quite different sphere — high up in the Himalaya Mountains. The railroad company gave us an open railway-car in which to make our trip to Darjeeling; also the use of two or three servants who prepared the best of meals on the way. Of course we were informed of lions that had crossed the track immediately before our arrival. Father said probably they realized that he didn’t care much about lions and so had not waited. The higher we mounted, the greater the fog, so that when we finally reached Darjeeling about a climb of 7,000 feet we could not see a single snow-peak [MFMT 162].

Sam’s notebook entry shows part of the time on this trip was passed by constructing an attack on “that most self-complacent of all poems, Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” by Reginald Heber [Gribben; NB 36 TS 45].

At 9:30 p.m. Sam lectured in the Darjeeling Town Hall to an audience mixed with year-round residents, planters from Kurseong and Terai, a few from Calcutta and travelers. Sam told the audience he’d been advised by no fewer than nine people in Calcutta that it would be very cold at Darjeeling and to wear warm clothes — “I have taken their advice and am now wearing the whole nine suits” [Parsons “MT India” 89]. Reviews published Feb. 19: Calcutta Englishman [Ahluwalia 22].