scenery is most magnificent, and I doubt if it is
possible to find anywhere in the same compass the characteristics of the
different zones of vegetation--from tropical to temperate, from
temperate to alpine--so beautifully exhibited.

At ordinary seasons transport is easy, and one can take the road in
comfort; but now every mule and pony in Sikkim and the Terai is employed
on the lines of communication, and one has to pay 300 rupees for an
animal of the most modest pretensions. It is reckoned eight days from
Darjeeling to Chumbi, but, riding all day and most of the night, I
completed the journey in two. Newspaper correspondents are proverbially
in a hurry. To send the first wire from Chumbi I had to leave my kit
behind, and ride with poshteen[8] and sleeping-bag tied to my saddle. I
was racing another correspondent. At Rungpo I found that he was five
hours ahead of me, but he rested on the road, and I had gained three
hours on him before he left the next stage at Rora Thang. Here I learnt
that he intended to camp at Lingtam, twelve miles further on, in a tent
lent him by a transport officer. I made up my mind to wait outside
Lingtam until it was dark, and then to steal a march on him unobserved.
But I believed no one. Wayside reports were probably intended to deceive
me, and no doubt my informant was his unconscious confederate.

[8] Sheepskin.

Outside Rungli, six miles further on, I stopped at a little Bhutia's
hut, where he had been resting. They told me he had gone on only half an
hour before me. I loitered on the road, and passed Lingtam in the dark.
The moon did not rise till three, and riding in the dark was exciting.
At first the white dusty road showed clearly enough a few yards ahead,
but after passing Lingtam it became a narrow path cut out of a
thickly-wooded cliff above a torrent, a wall of rock on one side, a
precipice on the other. Here the darkness was intense. A white stone a
few yards ahead looked like the branch of a tree overhead. A dim
shapeless object to the left might be a house, a rock, a
bear--anything. Uphill and downhill could only be distinguished by the
angle of the saddle. Every now and then a firefly lit up the white
precipice an arm's-length to the right. Once when my pony stopped
panting with exhaustion I struck a match and found that we had come to a
sharp zigzag. Part of the revetment had fallen; there was a yard of
broken path covered with fern and bracken, then a drop of some hu