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Updated: June 2, 2025
Malice and heartburning were out of the question with a lissom, winsome, witching fairy like this, who played with her life as a child does with soap-bubbles, and who was as elusory and irresponsible as a summer-day rainbow. But one season at Mussoorie Miss Priest contracted an engagement somewhat less evanescent. Mussoorie of all Himalayan hill-stations is the most demure and proper.
Those Anglo-Indians who wish to make the acquaintance of the bird must either resort to some fancier's shop, or hie themselves to the cool heights of Mussoorie, or, better still, of Darjeeling, where the liothrix is exceptionally abundant.
None the less, she made great parade of her formal inspections, the riot of which could be heard half-way to Mussoorie. Kim relaxed, as one augur must when he meets another. The hakim, still squatting, slid over his hookah with a friendly foot, and Kim pulled at the good weed. The hangers-on expected grave professional debate, and perhaps a little free doctoring.
It might have been the hills under Mussoorie, and what our cars expected to do in it I could not understand. But the demon-driver who had been a road-racer took the 70 h.p. Mercedes and threaded the narrow valleys, as well as occasional half-Swiss villages full of Alpine troops, at a restrained thirty miles an hour.
Nevertheless few people who have not actually been in both localities are able to realise the startlingly abrupt transformation of the bird-fauna seen by one who passes from the plains to the hills. The 5-mile journey from Rajpur to Mussoorie transports the traveller from one bird-realm to another. The caw of the house-crow is replaced by the deeper note of the corby.
The Sea and the Hills. 'Who goes to the hills goes to his mother. They had crossed the Siwaliks and the half-tropical Doon, left Mussoorie behind them, and headed north along the narrow hill-roads. Day after day they struck deeper into the huddled mountains, and day after day Kim watched the lama return to a man's strength.
There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses "repeats" on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers' Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something not fever wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad.
Its noisy call kuil, kuil, kuil, which may be expressed by the words you're-ill, you're-ill, who-are-you? who-are-you? is heard throughout the sub-Himalayan regions in the early summer, and I have heard it as high up as Rajpur below Mussoorie, but have not noticed the bird at any of the hill stations except Almora.
It is on account of this peculiar habit of hovering in the air that the kestrel is often called the wind-hover in England. Needless to say, the kestrel affects open tracts rather than forest country. One of these birds is usually to be seen engaged in its craft above the bare slope of the hill on which Mussoorie is built.
Scimitar-babblers are so called because of the long, slender, compressed beak, which is curved downwards like that of a sunbird. Several species of scimitar-babbler occur in the Himalayas. The above mentioned is the most abundant in the Western Himalayas. This species is known as the Banbakra at Mussoorie. Its bill is 1½ inch long. The upper plumage is olive brown.
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