far distant country. It is a substantial and handsome
little building of stone, roofed in red of such a well-
remembered tint, that it is some time before one realises
that tiles are impossible at Gangtok. Hitherto it has
been the end of all northern travel in India, and it
must have been curious for the rare travellers who made
demands on Claude White’s famous hospitality, to find
this dainty gem of a house, furnished from Oxford
Street within, and without encircled with the tree ferns
and orchids of this exquisite valley. It is a perfect spot.
Far off to the west rise the pinnacles of Nur-sing and
Pan-dim ; to the north there hangs in heaven that most
exquisite of all peaks of earth, Siniolchu.
Beyond Gangtok, before the expedition came, there
was no road. Indeed, a road wide enough for carts was
finished only eighteen months ago up to the gates of
the Residency. Further on, it is still a bridle track
hugging the side of the hill, barely thrusting its way
through the dense wall of bamboo which rises on either
side like the green walls through which Moses led his
flying countrymen.* Overhead the giant rhododendrons
branch upwards to the sky, high as a London house.
No one who knows the rhododendron of England can
form the faintest conception of what these monsters
of the upper hills are like. The trees at Haigh Hall
and at Cobham are regarded by their owners with some
complacency. But in size they are mere shrubs compared
with their brothers of Sikkim, and in beauty
they are left far behind. “ I know nothing of the kind,”
says Hooker, “ which exceeds in beauty the flowering
branch of rhododendron argenteum, with its wide-spreading
*T h e colour, too, contributes to the fantasy, for here the blue-leaved Hooker’s
bamboo grows more freely among its commoner brethren than anywhere else in the
Himalayas.
foliage and glorious mass of flowers.” This variety,
though it does not grow to the height of its brethren,
is the finest of them all. The enormous glossy leaves,
powdered with white underneath, are thrown with a
careless grace around the splendid blossoms, arranged
with all the delicate looseness and lightness which none
On the Rong-ni.
but the Master Gardener could give to this royal and
massive foliage. The actual florets of the commoner
kinds are undoubtedly poorer than those of the English
variety, and there is an ineffective conical arrangement
of their azalea-like blossoms which the Englishman
notices at once. But in their masses, crimson, lemon
and white, they star the dark green steamy recesses
v o l . 1. 5