IN THE CHITTAGONG HILL TRACTS 121 



had a fair amount of rain already and the horse floundered 

 about in the soft earth like a camel on a wet road. I was 

 jolly glad to get in, and a warm welcome awaited me. 

 Incidentally I did my friend a very bad turn in connexion 

 with his new road. My kit was coming along on an elephant 

 and the idiot of a mahout, with the official menial's disregard 

 for anything and anyone non-official, took his beast right 

 up the centre of the new soft road, gouging out two-foot- 

 deep circular holes with every stride the animal took. Most 

 enraging can these men be. The elephant plus the mahout 

 belonged to the Commissioner and not to me, but that did 

 not make matters easier. 



Two-thirty a.m. saw me awakened next morning. A cup 

 of tea and I dressed and had a solid meal in the dining-room. 

 My friend was safely in bed and I envied him and devoutly 

 wished I had never arranged to set out at such an unearthly 

 hour. 



The forests of this part of India are quite unlike the dry, 

 hot jungles of Chota Nagpur and the Central Provinces. 

 Here the great heat is present but with it an atmosphere 

 impregnated with moisture. Consequently one lives in a 

 greenhouse temperature, and the flora is characteristic of 

 such a temperature. A great number of species of giant 

 timber trees fill the valleys and stretch up the lower 

 slopes of the hills, with an under-story of smaller soft-wood 

 species, cane brakes and grass, alternate with great expanses 

 of scrub growth of soft-wood species or whole hill-sides 

 clothed with bamboos — the two latter the aftermath of the 

 jhumer. The commonest bamboo is known as the muli 

 {Melocanna hamhusioides) which does not grow in clumps, 

 each stem coming singly out of the ground from a ramifi- 

 cated underground rhizome. As the stems often grow very 

 thickly together it becomes very difficult to make one's way 

 through them, and even more difficult to pick up a bison in 

 such jungle. Tracking, owing to the soft ground, is easy, 

 and the peril of the dry leaf and snapping twig underfoot is 

 absent. The great difficulty I experienced was to pick out 

 an animal in these new surroundings. In Chota Nagpur I 

 had learnt to pick up a bison in its natural environment 

 with fair ease. But that experience did not help me very 

 much here. The sea of green in these jungles was of a totally 

 different colouring and density with, consequently, as an 

 artist will reaUze, a complete alteration in the play of hght 



