Winter India/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII
SIMLA
MRITSAR'S railway platform—the same where Kim was put off the train for want of a ticket to Ambala, and by his wits was soon on board again—was most picturesque the noonday we started for Simla. A man in a blue coat with yellow cuffs and a red shawl thrown over his shoulder was only first figure in the crowd of red, blue, orange, and green-shawled creatures, in turbans of red, pink, orange, lemon, and salmon, in blue and gray Ludhiana lungis with gold-striped ends. An ash-smeared fakir crouched gibbering by the wall near the tank labeled, "Water for Mohammedans," and a high-caste Brahman protected water sacred to his co-religionists' use. A woman whose jewelry was but half concealed by a thin sari held an umbrella down over her face as she squatted on the concrete, and her owner threw a sheet over the umbrella and fiercely guarded the beehive tent. From this retreat, the woman peered forth, clashed and jangled her jewels to attract our attention, and made eager signs for us to come near that she might inspect us.
All afternoon we rode straight toward a long, blue horizon-line that grew, until at sunset, at Ambala, we had the great wall of the Himalayas plainly before us. We changed trains, and jolted over the thirty-five miles to Kalka in complete darkness. At nine o'clock we stumbled through a dark, deserted village to the so-called hotel, which was a little better than a stable only in that it had not yet been used for horses. We spread our bedding in chill, whitewashed, stone-floored rooms opening upon a stone porch; and once more in darkness followed a lantern through the streets to the post-office. There we agreed to pay the government of India, or the postmaster-general, seventy-five rupees for a "tonga phaëton," i. e., a two-pony victoria, with sixteen relays of ponies, for the fifty-seven-mile drive up to Simla and return.
Wholly by our own energies we got the establishment astir the next morning at half-past six o'clock. The worst coffee in India was brought, with the usual smoky toast and repulsive butter-plate—this at perhaps the only hotel in India ever patronized by the official class, and which the smart, the luxury-loving and disdainful, must endure twice a year if they go to Simla. Western civilization in India, taking the hotel as its index, is at lowest ebb at Kalka.
Our tonga, or "fitton" in native colloquial, arrived at our door before sunrise, drawn by two bullocks. We mounted and were slowly dragged to the post-office, from which exact point the government had agreed to transport us. The two ponies were then affixed,—"as per contract," said the babu,—made fast by traces running to a tonga, or steel bar fastened yoke-wise to both girths. Away they went by leaps and bounds, and at a gallop, up hill, around corners, and along a country road through the foothills. Every three or four miles, the driver winded his horn, the ponies redoubled their efforts to run away, and we bounded into a tonga station, where the relay ponies stood waiting in harness. The steel bar was loosened and pinned to the girths of the new ponies, the traces and reins made fast, and we shot forth at the fixed gait of eight miles an hour.
It was a clear, cloudless day, with hoar-frost over the grass of the bare hillsides and on the rice-fields that in curving terraces filled every valley and ravine, rippling away in lines that seemed designed for ornament only. There were plantations of trees, but no forests—none of the jungles that one expects at the foot of such a mountain-range. In the distance clumps of intensely green Pinus longifolia waved their nine- and ten-inch-long needles as softly as bamboos. We mounted long inclines, whence we had a magnificent view of the hills and plains below, or looked up and across to the loops of the road above us. Sometimes we could watch the next relay station as we drove toward it, and with the glasses note the preparations for our arrival. Bullock-trains under guard of sepoys, low mail-tongas bringing convalescents down from the sanatoriums, and a few camel-trains passed by. The bearded Sikhs, the turbaned Pathans, and the handsome Kashmiris of Lahore and Amritsar streets had vanished, and in 
THE HALL OF AUDIENCE, JEYPORE
While two plunging animals refused either to be led or backed up to the "fitton," the babu informed us that this was the best post-road in India; that it had the best carriages and best ponies; that the government pays one and two hundred rupees for the best Peshawar and Agra horses, and sells them cheap at the end of six or eight months, since only the best stock will do for or can stand the Simla travel. Across the valley we could see twenty horses sunning themselves before the next station, ready for the day's relays, and our early start gave us the choice of the successive stables. From Solon the road led steadily up over bare brown hills, marked by the path of landslides or the green of afforestation efforts, set with candlestick cacti and striped with an occasional patch of snow. All the boulders were painted over with and the pine groves stuck full of advertisements of a certain "Green Seal Whisky," the Himalayas as gaudy as a London omnibus or railway station. At last a turn revealed to us the snowy range, far away up against the sky, and then Simla's straggling crescent of houses was seen across a great chasm or valley. In seven hours and a half—just the time taken for the trifling trains to climb to Darjiling—we reached the Simla tonga station, seven thousand and eighty-five feet above the sea.
It was the place of the "Phantom Rickshaw," but what a material vehicle appeared to us! No wonder it is spelled with an unnecessary "c" and a barbarous "w," or with any alphabetical lumber that can be dragged in by Anglo-Indians. Nothing could be more ludicrous in a farce or burlesque in a Japanese theater than such a vehicle. Four thousand miles by road and centuries of intelligent development lie between the Tokio jinrikisha and the Simla "jinny rickshaw"—the one an airy seat on flying wheels; the other a solid, clumsy cart, a rattling, rumbling affair of cast-iron and thick planks, drawn by four shuffling coolies, who walk leaning against the long tongue or the back board of the undersized juggernaut.
A late tiffin awaited us in the ramshackle wooden hotel, which, patched, shabby, and unsightly, was in the hands of workmen getting ready for the opening of the season in March, The landlord was voluble and kind, for tourists never come to the hill-tops in winter, and he gave us the best of the shabby old rooms—dark, sunless holes, with cheap furniture and fittings so long past their day that they might well be put in a museum of last-century crudities. Yet here fashion and arrogance abide from March to November, and the gayest social life goes on, despite the frightful thunder- and hail-storms—rains that are nearly water-spouts and cloud-bursts, and that continue for three months.
It was like turning the pages of "Plain Tales from the Hills" even to read the street signs as we lumbered about that crescent ridge of the summer capital. Jakko, the Mall, the Ladies' Mile, Elysium Hill, and all the rest were there, and we traveled the same road that Mr. Isaacs and the fair English girl rode together. There were the shops of jewelers,—in one of which Kim and the other boy counted the loose stones in trays,—shops of silk, silver, and curio merchants, of milliners and pastry-cooks, all boarded fast for the winter, and behind them the ramshackle buildings of the native bazaar dropped along the hillsides in crazy terraces. There were English villas and cottages, and nothing Oriental or truly Indian in the aspect of the place, and we had a stranger's feeling. Our slow-moving coolies were barefooted and barelegged, and when they stepped aside from the beaten track of slush to let bullock-trains pass, they often stood more than ankle deep in snow. As the setting sun played a fire-pageant over the line of snow-peaks, the chill mountain air penetrated our wraps and rugs, but the red-cheeked English girls in cotton shirt-waists strolled slowly home with their tennis rackets, as if it were a day in June. How we wished we might go with them; that they would ask us to follow on and have a cup of tea and meet Mrs. Hauksbee, the Gadsbys, and all the rest we knew so well! We wanted, too, to hear more about those long-past seasons when occult science and the new religion were setting Simla wild; when Mme. Blavatsky, the suspected Russian spy, was working her miracles, and great mahatmas and yogis were arriving from nowhere, with nothing in their hands, and letters dropped from the ceiling as commonly as from the postman's bag. A. P. Sinnett, the editor of the Pioneer, was leader in the occult movement, and by his "Esoteric Buddhism" and "Karma" theosophy spread to the Occident. We had glimpses of those days in "Mr. Isaacs," and Mr. Crawford's Ram Lal is to be taken seriously. The whole clumsy fraud had been exposed when Kipling came, and in "The Sending of Dana Da" we have an irreverent account of a specimen case. When all the claptrap and collusion, the mechanical devices and unblushing frauds had been exposed, laughter shook the Himalayan hills, and the rich natives, who had financed the apostles as furthering a crusade against Christianity and mission work, were left in tears. The London Society for Psychical Research sent their keenest investigator, and there was no mystery left—Isis was completely unveiled, and theosophy has since been a dead issue in Simla; and all its miracles were proved to be in line with Dana Da's sending of the kittens.
In February we walked the terraced promenade by the reservoir alone, and had the sunset view of the snowy range quite to ourselves. Three small Anglo-Indians lingered by the cathedral door. We asked them the name of the large, white peak that rose above the long, snowy ridge. "I don't know the name. The snows—just the snows—is what we always call them," said one Wee Willie.
Even the landlord made a wry face when we said we had come to see Simla as a tribute to Kipling; that we should not have been satisfied to leave India without visiting this scene of so many of his stories. We assured the landlord—manager, rather—that we could not have appreciated nor understood India but for Kipling, nor Kipling but for India; that we now realized our debt to Kipling and the measure of his genius. The manager did not make vigorous protest, like all the other Anglo-Indians, for the wise man quarrels not with his bread and butter, and women who make pleasure-trips to Simla in February are not to be held accountable beyond the regular per diem rates in rupees.
The nights at Simla were something to benumb an arctic explorer, and it was a relief to rise in darkness and leave the tonga station long before the sunrise glow was seen beyond Jakko's heights. As we galloped away and down, the shadow of the Plimalayas retreated from the tawny, hazy plain—a plain, as level and vast as the ocean, lying beneath the frost-haze. We had another sunny breakfast at Solon, and, timing our halts, we found two minutes by the watch sufficient to change ponies at any station. At ten minutes past two o'clock, seven hours after leaving Simla, we were at Kalka post-office, and a train soon carried us on to Ambala, where a four-hour wait was enlivened by the departure of a wedding-party from the cantonment. Ladies in laces and pale pink gowns brightened the dark train-shed and platforms as they threw slippers and rice. Silk-hatted men in frock-coats and pearl trousers covered the rails with torpedoes that gave joyful salute as the wheels rolled over them. A gorgeously turbaned person in a gold brocade dressing-gown and silver-toed, green leather slippers, and who ought to have been one of the hill rajas we forever read about, caught the eye completely. Sad to say, he was only the coachman of a polo-playing hill raja who had sent the bride and groom to the train in his state landau.