I left and went out to the gate where the snake-charmers
were juggling with a dozen hissing cobras. It was pleasanter to look
at them.

That night an eminent English artist, temporarily in Benares,
discoursed to me at length though vaguely on the beauties of Hindu
religious theory, but what I had seen during the day did not help his
argument. Emerson's phrase may well be applied to Hinduism, "What you
are speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say."

Not that it has anything to do with Hinduism but simply to get a
better taste in the mouth at the end, let us turn in conclusion to a
happier subject. Some days ago I went to Darjeeling on the boundary of
northern India and on the edge of the great Himalaya mountain range.
In sight from its streets and from nearby peaks are the highest
mountains formed by the Almighty's hand, the sublimest scenery on
which the eye of mortal man may ever rest.

Long before daylight one morning I bestrode a sure-footed horse and
wound my way, with two friends of a day, as friends on a foreign tour
are likely to prove, to the top of Tiger Hill, from which point we
looked across the boundaries of Tibet and saw the sun rise upon a view
whose majesty defied description. In the distance on our left there
glittered in its mantle of everlasting snow, and with its twin
attendants, the summit of Mt. Everest, 29,002 feet high, the highest
mountain on the surface of the earth. Even grander was the view
directly in front of us, for there only one third as far away as
Everest, royal {209} Kinchinjunga shouldered out the sky, its colossal,
granite masses, snow-covered and wind-swept, towering in dread majesty
toward the very zenith. Monarch of a white-clad semicircle of kingly
peaks it stood, while the sun, not yet risen to our view, colored the
pure-white of its crest with a blush of rose-tint, and in a minute or
two had set the whole vast amphitheatre a-glitter with the warm hues
of its earliest rays. Across forty-five miles of massive chasms and
rugged foothills (these "foothills" themselves perhaps as high as the
highest Alps or Rockies) we looked to where, thousands of feet higher
yet, there began the eternal snow-line of Kinchinjunga, above which
its further bulk of 11,000 additional feet formed a dazzling
silhouette against the northern sky. Stand at the foot of Pike's Peak
and imagine another Pike's Peak piled on top; stand at the foot of
Mount Mitchell and imagine four other Mount Mitchell