38 THE RAIN FOREST. 



there are where the strangest forms of vegetation are seen, some found 

 nowhere else in the hills. The whole neighbourhood lias a weird char- 

 acter. Aged trees of huge dimensions, whose ponderous arms are clad 

 with grey moss and ferns far out to their points ; tough, gnarled, leaiiess 

 creepers, as thick as a child's body, growing from one root, whither they 

 mount the tall trees around, and thence spread like the arms of a cuttle- 

 fish in every direction, curling round some trunks, clearing long spans in 

 places, and often extending for three hundred yards without varying much 

 in thickness, — make some of the chief features of the woods in these deep 

 valleys. Few flowers are found ; the whole is a damp, gloomy, hoary 

 forest, sacred as it were to the first mysteries of nature. Game — even 

 elephants and bison — are seldom seen here ; the dense foliage overhead pre- 

 vents grass growing beneath, so there is nothing for them to eat ; but they 

 form safe retreats for animals in their neighbourhood when the jungles are 

 burning during the hot weather. When any animals escaped us in the 

 first range, or the lower jungles of the open country, and reached this 

 haven, which is known as " Mullay Karcloo," or the Eain Forest, we gen- 

 erally had to abandon the chase, as it required a well-organised expedition 

 to penetrate the tract. 



Close to the mouth of the gorge by which the Honhollay river emerges 

 into the lower jungles through the most westerly or Mysore range, is the site 

 of an old and long-deserted village called Dodda Goudan Parliah, and from 

 this I have named the gorge. The last inhabitants of this place apparently 

 left about 1820, but it must have been practically deserted at least twenty 

 years before that time. The divisions of the fields, broken ragi-grinding 

 stones, and stone terraces built round the foot of the trunks of old tamarind 

 and peepul trees, are still to be seen. It was once a populous village, in 

 which iron-smelting was carried on. The site of the village and the fields 

 are still comparatively free of jungle ; but by August the grass grows very 

 high about them, and the place is then a favourite resort of game, especially 

 bison, whilst in the low country. 



In addition to Dodda Goudan Parliah, there are the remains of other 

 villages, apparently contemporary with it, in different parts of the lower 

 jungles, but I have tried in vain to obtain any very authentic explana- 

 tion of the causes of their abandonment. From the tales which some of 

 the oldest Sh51agas remember their fathers relating of the ransacking to 

 which villages were frequently subjected in these parts during Hyder and 

 Tippoo's days, and the early days of the British (between 1780 and 1800), 

 at the hands of Brinjarries (gipsy grain-carriers), who, when conveying grain 

 to the troops between Mysore and Coimbatore, passed through this country, 



