It is like the side of a house.
People have before now slipped over their horses' tails going up
that terrific ascent, and I cannot conceive how the horses' girths
manage to hold. Naini Tal is a delightful spot, with bungalows
peeping out of dense greenery that fringes a clear lake. As in
most hill-stations, the narrow riding tracks are scooped out of
the hillsides with a perpendicular drop of, say, 500 feet on one
side. These khudd paths, in addition to being very narrow, are so
precipitous that it takes some while getting used to riding along
them. A rather tiresome elderly spinster had come up to Naini Tal
on a visit to a relative, and was continually bewailing the
dangers of these khudd paths. She had hoped, she declared, to put
on a little flesh in the hills, but her constant anxiety about the
khudds was making her thinner than ever. A humorous subaltern,
rather bored at these continual laments, observed to her: "At all
events, Miss Smith, you'll have one consolation. If by any piece
of bad luck you should fall over the khudd, you'll go over thin,
but you'll fall down plump--a thousand feet.
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