132 DR. HOOKER' S MISSION TO INDIA. 
a burning sun; and so ended our tiger-hunt! The beaters received. 
afterwards about a penny a-piece for the day's work ; a rich guerdon 
for these poor wretches, whom necessity sometimes drives to feed on 
rats and offal. 
We were detained three days at Sulkun, from inability to get on 
with the carts; and as the pass over the Kymaor to the north (or the 
way to Mirzapore), was to be a still worse task, I took advantage of 
Mr. Felle’s kind offer of camels and elephants to make the best of my 
way forward, accompanying that gentleman, ex route, to his residence 
at Shahgungh, on the table-land. 
I found nothing to remark on this curious flat; the weather and 
the botany being similar to what I had experienced in the Soane 
valley, from which it is but a few miles removed. The crops were 
wretched, and there was barely a good tree on the plain. The dryness 
of the atmosphere is excessive ; the most familiar instance of which that 
can give you is that my comb, a very strong tortoise-shell one, fell 
into five pieces in ordinary use. 
Though so poor, the natives are far from honest; for they robbed 
one of the tents placed between two others, wherein a light was burn- 
ing and three gentlemen lay. One was broad awake, with his back to 
the light, when turning round accidentally, he saw five men at his bed- 
side, who escaped with a bag of booty, in the shape of clothes, and a 
tempting strong brass-bound box, containing, however, nothing bu' 
private letters. The clothes they dropped outside ; but the letters are 
kept, perhaps, till they learn how to read them! There were abouta 
hundred camp-people asleep outside the tents, close to the ropes, be- 
tween whose many fires the rogues must have passed, eluding also 
the Pase (?) of the guard, who were, or ought to have been, awake. 
arch 3rd.—Bade adieu to Mr. Williams and his kind party, whom 
I pies to see at Mirzapore, before I should leave, and rode to the 
Ghaut, passing over a plain to the village of Markounda, at the foot of 
the Ghaut. There the country becomes very rocky and wooded, and a 
stream is crossed, running over a flat bed of limestone, cracked up into 
the appearance of a tessellated pavement, the interstices filled with vol- 
canic (?) matter. 
For many miles õn either side, this is the only ascent of the range, 
and is evidently a fault, or shifting of the rocks, producing so broken 
