152 DIARY OF A SPORTSMAN NATURALIST 



great stretches of shingle with here and there dense patches 

 of tall elephant grass. Islands, some of considerable 

 extent and covered with sissu {Dalbergia Sissoo) and 

 khair (Acacia Catechu) trees and elephant grass, break up 

 the shingle patches, a favourite haunt of game, tiger, 

 sambhar, and so on. One may have ridden a hundred yards 

 or more across the rough fair-weather road, whose only 

 claim to the title consists in a row of large shingles placed on 

 either edge to mark the thoroughfare, before one sees a sign 

 of the river and then a stream of beautiful clear, pellucid 

 water is reached which may form the main river, twenty 

 yards or so across, or may be a minor tributary branch. To 

 the south the great forest, broken in the foreground by 

 patches of sissu, khair, and tall grass, stretches away in the 

 flat plain until it reaches the cultivated lands. To the north 

 the foothills, also covered with an interminable sea of green, 

 or with bare and scarred rocky faces higher up, block the view 

 of the more elevated ranges behind them ; except where in 

 some favoured spot an opening may give a coup d'ceil of a 

 distant snowy peak, vignetted against a blue sky with green 

 hills on either side and waving grass and brilliant sissu 

 copses at its base. 



Out in the plains beyond the green forest line lies one of 

 the most densely populated areas in India. Well-built 

 pretty villages embosomed in trees or bamboo clumps, or 

 with a neighbouring banyan tope, are dotted about amidst a 

 fertile country in which magnificent crops are grown, the 

 variation in height, appearance, and colour of which forms 

 a most attractive feature of the countryside. Here the 

 little black buck roam in numbers which are still very con- 

 siderable in spite of the incessant toll taken of their 

 ranks. The nilgai or blue bull, that curious antelope 

 which in bodily appearance is so like a pony, also lives 

 out in the fields, lying up in small patches of jungle during 

 the day. 



It is a beautiful country and perhaps to appreciate it to 

 the full it is necessary to have spent some years in the hot, 

 damp, pestilential heat of parts of India to the south — 

 Eastern Bengal for example, and to have had the opportunity 

 of experiencing for oneself the conditions of life of one's 

 confreres in those parts. 



It was in January that I made my first acquaintance with 

 the jungles of the north-west. I had come straight up from 



