Englishmen cannot understand these pests of the hot
mountain-side, which appear in March, and exist like
black threads^fringing every leaf till September kills
them in myriad millions.* Spruce grows here under
a Latin name, and the writer enters thereupon a layman’s
protest. It takes away half the interest of new
and tropical vegetation if the only names that one
can be told for some magnificent or graceful thing are
Latin atrocities, generally embedding some uncouth
Teutonic surname. In a country like Sikkim one’s
resentment is doubled; when a good English word
lies ready to hand, why should it be necessary to call
the spruce tree abies excelsa, or, worse still, Smithiana ?
Leaving Gangtok, the last reminder of the West, one
strikes out east by north to make the final climb which
takes one out of the Empire. For five miles the road
is— or rather, until the rains came, was— a good one.
Beyond that, in spite of much hard work of pioneers
and sappers, the track is bad indeed. Karponang, f
when I returned through it for the last time, was a far-
stretched hamlet, lying in long tiered sheds against the
mountain wall, and the last pretence of a road along
which a wheel can go is here frankly abandoned. Beyond
it is a section of the road which for months was the
despair of the engineers. “ The tenth to the thirteenth
* It is worth a passing note that these unwelcome visitors can be driven from the
nostrils of the cattle exactly as MacComglinney enticed the “ lawless beast ” from the
throat of King Cathal. A bowl of warm milk at the cow’s nose, a little slip-knot, and
a quick hand are all that is required. Fourteen or fifteen successively have been thus,
taken from the nostrils of one unfortunate heifer.
+ The name Karponang was suggested for the ten-mile stage by the writer. From a
perilously insufficient knowledge of Tibetan, karfto seemed to mean “ white ” and nang*
was clearly a “ house” and as some shorter title was needed for the political
officer’s bantling, Karponang stuck, though it is not, perhaps, a particularly idiomatic
rendering of what it was intended to mean.
Rhododendron trees on the road above Gangtok, about eighty feet high.