IN THE SAL FORESTS 371 



jungle, filled with feverish exhalations and microbes of un- 

 known venom, has been dried by a rigorous sun into the 

 semblance of salubrity for the European traveller. 



The position of these wilds the writer would not object 

 to give here, were Indian game less on the decrease. 

 They lay there forty years ago. Of which time I possess 

 a diary then describing them truly a hunter's paradise, to 

 be read of with beating heart and watering mouth. They 

 lie there now Ichabod ! to be mourned over ; their day 

 gone by, desolate, crossed at intervals by some rare, shy, 

 phenomenally astute descendants of the once great herds 

 now practically extinct by reason of murrain, drought, 

 and, deadlier still, incursions of gun-bearing natives and 

 gun-running merchants from that horrible country lying to 

 the west, across the big river, where, at an even earlier 

 date, most of the ungulata had become but a memory. 



But the country itself has not changed much. In the 

 western portions the ordinary dry central Indian forest 

 covers its undulating features and clothes its rugged 

 hills ; but to the eastward the sal forests begin, their 

 western limit strangely marked, so that a bird's-eye 

 view shows their green line cutting north and south as if 

 their plantation had been arranged by human agency 

 instead of by Nature herself. The reason of this abrupt 

 termination on a north and south line may be known to 

 the expert forester; but my companion and I, although 

 we examined the geological features of the country, were 

 unable to account for it. Hence, for hundreds of miles 

 eastward, the highly gregarious sal spreads its glossy 

 green, almost to the entire exclusion of other timber, 

 except where there are tracts capped by trap or basaltic 

 rock, where of course the characteristic salai and stunted 

 teak of this formation reasserts itself. From east to west 

 of this country passes the river, leaving mountain ranges 

 on each hand, through which it has worn an arduous 

 granite-bound course to join the greater river on the west 



