fine-leaved sprays of graceful, birch-like foliage for its crown. The timber of anjun is hard and heavy and fine in the grain, and when sleepers made of various forest trees were tried to prove their worth, the anjun sleepers stood the test better than those of teak or sal, remaining sound longer. There were no sal-trees nor teak in this jungle. There were plenty of tracks of great bison (gaur), but none were seen, though some Gond jungle men, who followed their tracks rapidly over the hard and rocky ground where no special track could be seen by the uneducated eye, pursuing steadily for some hours, did their best to bring me up to the herd. But night came on too soon, and we never sighted the great beasts. I had a shot at a bear which came to drink one evening at the pool. Unfortunately, the bullet struck and killed one of three cubs that were quietly asleep on the bear's back, not distinguishable from its coarse shaggy black coat. That bear came round the camp at night, when she had counted her little ones and found one short, making a loud and angry single call at intervals, which disturbed the camp a good deal. She came close up in the morning in thick bush jungle, but did not afford me another shot, and went off again, grumbling frequently.

The natives said that people who lived in this jungle were required by the fairies to perform certain pujas, otherwise they were generally taken with a deadly malady in the chest. The season of the hot winds is probably the healthiest time for visiting such places. Though the heat was intense on June 1, and the exposure all day to a vertical sun very trying, one did not suffer at all from chills at night. In fact, the night was hotter than the day. Still, by wearing a thick cotton padded khaki jacket and a big puggaree, wound native fashion round the head during the heat of the day while riding

an elephant or on foot, I found the heat quite bearable, and did not get fever. Ten days after, when the rains threatened and I marched back to Hoshangabad, I had an attack of sharp fever for a few days.

Large quantities of sal sleepers had to be furnished at a place on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway called Bagra, not far from Hoshangabad, where the last relics of a fine sal forest were being cut up for the use of the railway. The native method of sawing is ingenious. The logs are propped up in a sloping direction and cut with whip saws, one man standing on top and one below. Saw-pits were not used. Work in the forest came to an end in the rains, camping out and marching being impossible. Camels cannot carry loads over wet and slippery ground, as their big flat feet are more suited to dry and rocky soil. They frequently then slip and split up if loaded, and cannot stand a damp climate, dying like flies. Their owners drive them all back to the rainless Bikaner in the north-west, to graze on the babul or camel-thorns (Acacia Arabica) of those arid, sandy deserts, and bring them south again to be hired out in the dry season.

The rains at Hoshangabad can only be described as hot, relaxing, and incessant for four months. The normal conditions of life were mere existence, alternated with goes of fever; but sometimes there were delightful intervals of European-like weather, when one could ride abroad or take trips on elephants, which had to take all the messages to the railway station at Itarsi-ten miles-as the roads were impassable for carts. There is now a railway junction at Hoshangabad, and a fine bridge over the Nerbudda.

CHAPTER XXI

THE BORI FOREST

It

IN October, 1870, after the rains were over, the forest daftar (office) and camp moved out to the district. was proposed to hand over the plateau of Pachmari to the military for the purpose of a sanatorium for troops. The timber depot at Bagra was the site of our first camp. Tents were pitched under some giant mango and tamarind trees on the bank of the river Tawa, a large tributary of the Nerbudda. Here was a strange sight. The recently built railway bridge, about 100 yards long, had during the rains been entirely swept away by the heavy floods which came down from the Satpuras. Stone piers, girders, and all were gone, and nothing remained but the rails and sleepers, hanging together in the air by the fish-plates in a graceful curve some 50 feet above the river, which was now a placid, clear stream winding and gurgling over smooth rocks. The traffic was conducted on a deviation, which ran down into the bed of the river and up again the other side. There are always many such catastrophes on a new line in India during the first and second rainy

seasons.

Bagra is a lovely spot, with its huge shady trees. The park-like plain with cultivation mixed with forest, and the gorge of the river, on one side; on the south a rocky, tree-clad valley, and the ridges and ranges of the Satpuras

One

rising one above another to some 4,000 feet, and fading away in the blue distance. The ground was still covered with the luxuriant carpet of rain vegetation, weeds and plants and shrubs of many curious kinds, senna being a common bush about 2 feet high, and rose briars and yellow-flowering Cassia fistula abundant. Lovely feathery mimosas and acacias formed the lesser groves by the river, and occasional tall, straight sal and saj trees towered on the hillsides above the numerous trees of the forest. of our camps was near a village not far from the railwaystation, where we had to wait for some necessary equipment. It is fatal to pitch camp after the rains near a village, where the ground is soiled by cattle and villagers, no matter how beautiful and fresh the open fields may appear. The germs of fever are surely about, much more so than in the jungle. Here we were delayed by severe attacks of jungle fever, which affected natives and all alike. They would come shivering and off their heads in delirium, and throw themselves at the tent-door, raving and praying for dawai (medicine). Quinine, luckily, was plentiful.

The train from Bombay came by daily about breakfasttime, with its freight of healthy-looking arrivals from Europe, officials rejoining, and smartly-dressed young people, all full of hopes and excitement at the novelty of a strange country. Other trains went westward, freighted with the most depressing crowd of half-broken-down, sallow, carelessly clad, and weary-looking men, women, and children, to whom the wonders of the gorgeous East were a burden, and perhaps a terrible reminder of death and careers prematurely blighted. In the refreshment room we met friends of both categories, several quite unexpectedly; but were truly delighted to clear out on the earliest possible date from that camp, and move upwards

into the hills, where higher ground and better air and quinine soon chased headaches and shivers and collapse away. The road lay by a winding route, ever mounting higher through miles of jungle-clad hills, only a bridletrack where elephants, horses, and camels could just get along. Gangs of coolies were at work repairing the damage done by the rains and widening the road. A camp was chosen at a long ago deserted village. Many such exist in all parts of India as well as in the poems of great writers. Here were the old terraced fields all grown over with dense thicket, where houses once stood. Wild orange and citron trees shed their golden fruit on the ground unheeded. The clumps of great wide-leaved bananas were choked by thorny trees and tangled brushwood. A grove of mango-trees left crowded together had grown to an immense height, with bare, tall stems, and a date-palm tree, with slender stalk fully 120 feet high, overtopped them all. There were planters of orchards in those days who had some intelligence above cutting down and selling, or spoiling earth's treasures for the sordid gain which is the high aim of modern industry.

The fields which were once ploughed were gone back into jungle and overgrown with grass 10 feet high, the lurking place of tigers and leopards. The neatly built well, whose clear water issued from the mountain through a carved stone mouth, still supplied the thirsty traveller; but the villagers were not there, and all that remained of the houses were some moss and fern covered stone walls, clasped by a network of pipal roots and shaded by giant fig-trees. The glory of the village was an immense banian-tree, standing alone and covering half an acre of level ground. This great tree, with a stem 50 feet in girth, continued to flourish and spread, with a