Word: yakskin
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Guests in top hats and cutaways mingled with others in fur-flapped caps and knee-length yakskin boots last week outside the tiny Buddhist chapel in Sikkim's dollhouse Himalayan capital of Gangtok. Wedding parcels from Tiffany's were piled side by side with bundled gifts of rank-smelling tiger and leopard skins. Over 28,146-ft. Mount Kanchenjunga, the world's third highest mountain and Sikkim's "protecting deity," hung a blue haze. It was an "auspicious sign," said Gangtok astrologers, for the wedding of a quiet, blue-eyed New York girl, Hope Cooke...
When India got its independence from the British in 1947, so did Sikkim. For a while the Sikkimese tried to run their own show. But one day in 1949, peasants in their high boots and yakskin suits surrounded the Maharajah's yellow palace at Gangtok (pop. 7,000), a capital of doll-like houses with blue pagoda roofs, perched precariously 6,000 ft. up a mountain. In a bloodless revolution, they got their demands for an elected national council and an end to tax collection by landlords. But after a 29-day experiment in democracy, the Maharajah dispatched...
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