who came every year in gangs of 100 men each for the season's work, November to May. There were over 2,500 of them at work at times. They were engaged at two annas a day each, and worked very fairly well under their own chaudhris (gangsmen), who were responsible for the work. These people are somewhat like Gurkhas. They possess but a blanket each and a lota (brass pot) to cook with, and they complain of great poverty in their own country. Their pay came seldom to a rupee a week, more often to twelve annas. Yet they lived so frugally on millet (a small grain called moth) that they generally had a good few silver rupees to take home, tied up in the end of a dirty loin-cloth.

The names of coolies in these hills are short, such as Jugia, Munnoo, Joga, Motee, distinguished by the addition of their caste or trade, such as Lohar (iron-worker or smith)-thus Jehan Lohar corresponds with John Smith -Sunar (silversmith), Darzi (tailor). Those who called themselves mistri were masons or carpenters, and brought some very primitive tools, similar to those used probably at the building of the Tower of Babel and Noah's ark. They use an adze and a drill worked by a bow, and a saw which works when pulled towards one, and hold the wood with their toes. Barhai mistri is a master carpenter, lohar mistri, a master blacksmith. The bellows used are made of two goat-skins, connected with an iron pipe which is built into a stone hearth. They are worked by a man who sits holding the ends of the bags, one in each hand, clasping two pieces of wood which open the end to let the air in as he draws it out, and when clasped and pressed expel the air through the pipe-right hand and left alternately-into the hearth where the charcoal fire burns. The anvil is a large stone, and with hammer and tongs very fair work is done.

Then there were the lime burners, timber workers, and

masons (raj mistri), not of the Dotial race, but men of the hills generally. The Kumaonis are mostly Hindus, and belong to a mild, hard-working, agricultural race, speaking a Hindi dialect. They are of a Semitic cast of feature, not like the Dotials, who are of a semi-Tartar race like the Gurkhas, speaking a Nepali dialect, have Chineselike slit eyes and sturdy muscular limbs, and are a more warlike people. Kumaon had been conquered by the Gurkhas before it came under British rule, but its people were not dispossessed of the land, which is everywhere terraced and cultivated up to the tops of the lower hills.

The masons were very clever at dressing and quarrying stones, and building them into the walls and buttresses of bridges which had to be thrown across mountain torrents and ravines. The mortar was made by attendant coolies, and the fitting and jointing of the stones was very neatly done in courses, and sometimes in cyclopean pattern, the stones being redressed when in position with stone adze-like hammers. There were timber fellers, who cut down the tall straight sal trees which grow in the forest, a very heavy and straight-grained timber, darker in colour but not unlike teak in the grain. Sal (Shorea robusta) grows all over the Bhabar, or foot-hills above the Terai, and up to 3,000 feet elevation. It was cut into great beams by men with adzes and whip-saws, who worked in the forest. These beams were used in constructing strong bridges on the principle of strut-and-tie girders, on which sal planks were laid for the roadway; piers 25 feet wide and buttresses were built where required on the foundations of great rock boulders, which were found in the river-beds, or resting on the solid waterworn rock, mostly red sandstone. There were twenty or more streams to be bridged over, of various sizes, from 20 feet to one of 100 feet, besides innumerable culverts in ravines where water flowed.

CHAPTER III

TIGER-HAUNTED JUNGLES

'MOTEE PUDHAN' was the headman, or pudhan, of Juli village, tall and lithe in body and limb. His handsome, well-cut features, dark expressive eyes, and small head, showed him to be of a higher caste. Motee signifies 'pearl.' He was not ill-named, being an honourable, truthful, and well-bred native. He was fairly prosperous, having a well-built stone house roofed with flags, and placed on the sunny side of the hill among his terraced lands, with sheds for his cattle; having also quite a large family growing up around him, and two very hard-working wives. He always got his barley or wheat sowed in good time, after the rice and millet crop had been cleared away, and had a very good return of corn, grown on his welltilled land, and reaped in March and early April; when it would again get ploughed by oxen and a wooden plough, and prepared for the sowing of rice, to be shortly flooded with pure running water led from the mountain stream close by. Then the women and young people would tread in and thin out the green rice plants, which grow in the mud under five or six inches of water. This crop is reaped in the rains. Rice constituted a staple food of the natives, along with wheaten flour made into chapatis, or thin unleavened cakes, with ghee or clarified butter. There were many cows belonging to the villagers,

very useful white and gray cattle with beautiful fine shiny coats and humps on the withers, black noses, and large black eyes. They are herded in the jungle by gualas, who take the whole village stock out daily to graze, and drive, or rather call, them home at night. Many have bells made of hard wood tied to their necks, which can be heard at some distance. Tigers know the sound of the cattle bells far too well, but without bells the cattle would be lost in the dense forest.

The head-quarters of the lower section of the road which ran through Motee's village were on his land, and several acres of his terraced fields were occupied by tents and chappars (grass huts) for the native staff. Yet his temper was never disturbed by the devastation of his land, for which an equitable compensation was given him. And in his cleanest white, hand-woven cotton chapkan, with a sheet for keeping himself warm, and a neat skull-cap, Motee would often present himself at the tent door to pay a friendly visit, bringing always a bunch of ripe plantains or some very fine oranges or pommeloes.* His greatest trouble was the constant terror of the tigers which frequented the dense jungles all round his village. His often repeated prayers to be delivered from their ravages were most earnest. And no wonder. He had seen, when a boy, his father struck down and carried off by a tiger, and not long afterwards his mother was similarly treated. Therefore the presence of a sahib with guns, and a crowd of workers on the road and blasting the rocks, was to him and his family and the other villagers rather a source of relief and a protection. They could now till their land with comparative safety, and the cattle returned home to be milked with whole skins;

* Officials are permitted by Government order to accept an offering of fruit from natives.

and his wives counted on rearing a good proportion of the calves and laying in a stock of ghee to be sold at the Naini Tal bazaar, and having plenty of dhai, or thick milk, for the baba log to drink. Still, there came reports from the neighbouring villages of a terrible manswag, or man-eater, who frequented the hills around and carried off occasionally a solitary woman or old man, who had ventured alone to cut grass in the jungle.

Motee had gone one day early in April to the bazaar on business. His wives were busy, one at home, the other with a sickle cutting the ripe barley in a field close to my camp, little suspecting that danger might lurk in the neighbourhood of so much life and activity. There was one patch of yellow barley, heavy with full grain, still to be cut on a terrace just round the spur of the hillside, beyond which flowed a clear mountain stream, babbling among great rounded rocks and over-arched by dark sal trees. Creepers twined in graceful festoons from tree to tree over the torrent, and the sun's bright rays scarcely penetrated into the deep shade below. Birds innumerable twittered and frisked from branch to branch, their brilliant plumage glancing in the sun. The paradise bird with long fluttering tail, the golden oriole calling with its plaintive whistle, and green parakeets with plumcoloured heads picked at the little figs of the pipal, while troops of jungle fowl like game bantams scuttled among the tree stems. All was peaceful and bright. Luckmee, the young wife, was happy at her nearly finished work, rejoicing that Motee would be pleased on his return to find the corn all cut. She grasped the standing corn with one hand, drawing the sickle to cut, stooping, near where a huge rock, all overgrown with ferns and mosses, lay close to the tangled thicket. Lying flat among the ferns, and quite invisible to the quickest eye, the man