t.'

The doolie was hitched up, and the _kahars_ resumed their chant:

'A sahib goes up;
Yes, he does.
A sahib goes down;
That is so.'

The heat and the monotonous cadence induced drowsiness, and one fell to
thinking of this odd motley of men, all of one genus, descended from the
anthropoid ape, and exhibiting various phases of evolution--the
primitive Lepcha, advanced little further than his domestic dog; the
Tibetan _kahar_ caught in the wheel of civilization, and forming part of
the mechanism used to bring his own people into line; the Lucknow
doolie-bearer and the Jemadar Sahib, products of a hoary civilization
that have escaped complexity and nerves; and lord of all these, by
virtue of his race, the most evolved, the English subaltern. All these
folk are brought together because the people on the other side of the
hills will insist on being obsolete anachronisms, who have been asleep
for hundreds of years while we have been developing the sense of our
duty towards our neighbour. They must come into line; it is the will of
the most evolved.

The next day I was carried for miles through a tropical forest. The damp
earth sweated in the sun after last night's thunder-storm, and the
vegetation seemed to grow visibly in the steaming moisture. Gorgeous
butterflies, the epicures of a season, came out to indulge a love of
sunshine and suck nectar from all this profusion. Overhead, birds
shrieked and whistled and beat metal, and did everything but sing. The
cicadas raised a deafening din in praise of their Maker, seeming to
think, in their natural egoism, that He had made the forest, oak, and
gossamer for their sakes. We were not a thousand feet above the sea.
Thousands of feet above us, where we were camping a day or two ago, our
troops were marching through snow.

The next morning we crossed the Tista River, and the road led up through
sal forests to a tea-garden at 3,500 feet. Here we entered the most
perfect climate in the world, and I enjoyed genial hospitality and a
foretaste of civilization: a bed, sheets, a warm bath, clean linen,
fruit, sparkling soda, a roomy veranda with easy-chairs, and outside
roses and trellis-work, and a garden bright with orchids and
wild-turmeric and a profusion of semi-tropical and English flowers--all
the things which the spoilt children of civilization take as a matter of
course, because they have never slept under the stars, or known what it
is to be h