ndian Peninsula Railway's main line leads out of Bombay
over the Ghats to Jabalpur, six hundred miles; thence a railway of
some two hundred and twenty miles runs to Allahabad, connecting them
with the great line, known as the East Indian Railway, which extends
for more than a thousand miles north-westward from Calcutta _via_
Patna, Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Agra and Delhi. Our
journey, as marked out by Bhima Gandharva, was to be from Bombay
to Jabalpur by rail; thence by some slow and easy conveyance across
country to Bhopal, and from Bhopal northward through Jhansi to Delhi
and the northern country, thence returning by rail to Calcutta.

As one ascends the Western Ghats shortly after leaving Bombay one has
continual occasion to remark the extraordinary resources of modern
railway engineering. Perhaps the mechanical skill of our time has not
achieved any more brilliant illustrations of itself than here occur.
For many miles one is literally going up a flight of steps by rail.
The word Ghat indeed means the steps leading up from pools or rivers,
whose frequent occurrence in India attests the need of easy access
to water, arising from the important part which it plays both in the
civil and religious economies of the Hindu. The Ghats are so called
from their terraced ledges, rising one above another from the shores
of the ocean like the stairs leading up from a pool. In achieving the
ascent of these gigantic stairs all the expedients of road-makers have
been resorted to: the zigzag, the trestle, the tunnel, the curve, have
been pushed to their utmost applications; for five continuous miles
on the Thull Ghat Incline there is a grade of one in thirty-seven,
involving many trying curves, and on nineteen miles of the Bhore Ghat
Incline there are thirty tunnels.

That which gives tone and character to a general view of the interior
of a railway-car in traveling is, from the nature of things, the
head-covering of the occupants, for it is this which mostly meets the
eye; and no one who has traveled in the United States, for example,
can have failed to observe the striking difference between the aspect
of a car in the South, where the felt slouch prevails, and of one
in the North, where the silk hat is more affected. But cars full
of turbans! There were turbans of silk, of muslin, of woolen; white
turbans, red, green and yellow turbans; turbans with knots, turbans
with ends hanging; neat turbans, baggy turbans, prete