palette which He has not used along this road. There
is no variety of vegetation which He has not permitted
to find its own place somewhere beside the slowly chilling
path. Sal and gurjun lead on through teak to kapok
and bamboo, then on through tree fern and rhododendron
to the pine. Beyond these last, birch-trees alone
survive among the frozen rocks of the upper snows. At
their roots, or from the hill-side above their tops, round
their stems, or springing from their wood is almost every
flower known to man, here wasting its luxuriance along
the loneliest and loveliest two hundred miles on earth.
Pepper ferns, with their dark green glossy foliage, vines
and bind weeds, begonias and asphodel tangle themselves
about the undergrowth of gorgeous shrubs, or
stumps gay with scarlet fungus and dripping moss.
Overhead the bald scarp of the rock, orange and ochre
and cinnamon rarely broke through the trailing glories
of smilax and other creepers. Once or twice down on
the road itself, where a passage had been blasted years
ago, the deep crystalline garnet rang not only with the
echoes of the sweeping water below, but with the tiny
persistence of the drip-well from its roof. Ferns lurk
in every cleft, and, higher up, the majesty of some great
osmunda thrusts itself clear of the green confusion
round its roots. Of greens, indeed, from the dark moss
myrtle of some varnished leaf that ought to have been a
magnolia, but probably was not, to the aquamarine of
the young and dusted bamboo grass, from the feathery
emerald of some patch of giant moss to the rich olive
of a crown-vallary of orchid, none is unrepresented.
Where the valley vegetation lies in the ugliest
putrefaction there you will find the living jewels of this
long fillet— a flash of emerald and chrome glazed with
chocolate ; a patch of brown, shot through and through
with sapphire in the sun ; a swallow-tail with olivine
and black velvet where we may rarely see, beside some
Norfolk broad, the dun and cream of his poor English
cousin. Strong in the wing, zigzagging unballasted in
ten-foot swoops of pure colour, the butterflies lace the
sunlight. And underfoot in the deep soft white dust
the kidney footmark of the brown ox, or the kukrilike
print of the high instepped native are the only
reminders in that hot world of colour that there are other
things as graceless as oneself.
At Riang, where the road falls into the river every
year with a regularity worthy of something better, a
stream breaks through from the west, and for a moment
the dingy picturesqueness of a semi-Indian settlement
beneath its trees drives back the beauties of the road.
But in half a mile the path turns again beneath close
matted branches overhead and winds, deep rutted,
beside the rank dark vegetation which is characteristic
of just this place— flowerless, amorphous and heavy.
The Tista bridge swings out its curve from behind a
rock, and, one crosses the narrow span, realising from its
scanty width that one has left behind the normal limits
of wheeled cart traffic. The road, still ascending, keeps
on the left bank of the Tista river, passing Mali-ghat
among its trees three miles on. Slowly the character
of the vegetation changes, though the fact of its being
still tropical is clear enough from a tiger trap halfway
between Mali-ghat and Tar Kola. Beside this latter
place the road runs along tirelessly, curving and recurving
beside the shallow stream. At the junction of the Tista
with the Rang-po the creaming white crests over the
rock points below valiantly hold their own all day