From New Zealand back to Australia, and then with the new year away to Ceylon.  Here they were in the Orient at last, the land of color, enchantment, and gentle races.  Clemens was ill with a heavy cold when they arrived; and in fact, at no time during this long journeying was his health as good as that of his companions.  The papers usually spoke of him as looking frail, and he was continually warned that he must not remain in India until the time of the great heat.  He was so determined to work, however, and working was so profitable, that he seldom spared himself.

He traveled up and down and back and forth the length and breadth of India—­from Bombay to Allahabad, to Benares, to Calcutta and Darjeeling, to Lahore, to Lucknow, to Delhi—­old cities of romance—­and to Jeypore —­through the heat and dust on poor, comfortless railways, fighting his battle and enjoying it too, for he reveled in that amazing land—­its gorgeous, swarming life, the patience and gentleness of its servitude, its splendid pageantry, the magic of its architecture, the maze and mystery of its religions, the wonder of its ageless story.

One railway trip he enjoyed—­a thirty-five-mile flight down the steep mountain of Darjeeling in a little canopied hand-car.  In his book he says: 

That was the most enjoyable time I have spent in the earth.  For rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird-flight down the Himalayas in a handcar.  It has no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty- five miles of it, instead of five hundred.

Mark Twain found India all that Rudyard Kipling had painted it and more.  “India the marvelous” he printed in his note-book in large capitals, as an effort to picture his thought, and in his book he wrote: 

So far as I am able to judge nothing has been left undone, either by man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds.  “Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.”

Marvelous India is, certainly; and he saw it all to the best advantage, for government official and native grandee spared no effort to do honor to his party—­to make their visit something to be remembered for a lifetime.  It was all very gratifying, and most of it of extraordinary interest.  There are not many visitors who get to see the inner household of a native prince of India, and the letter which Mark Twain wrote to Kumar Shri Samatsinhji, a prince of the Palitana state, at Bombay, gives us a notion of how his unostentatious, even if lavish, hospitality was appreciated.