40 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTEAL INDIA. 



the bondage of parade routine for the free life of the 

 forest ; and to think that — 



No barbarous drums sliall be my wakening rude ; 

 The jungle cock shall crow my sweet reveill6. 



For the first five marches (eighty-two miles), my route 

 lay down the open and well-cultivated valley of the 

 Narbada. In the first march I went off the highway 

 to pay a last visit to a remarkable scene of beauty, a few 

 miles to the south of the road. What visitor to 

 Jubbulpiir can ever forget the Marble Rocks ! In 

 any country a mighty river pent up into a third of its 

 width, and for a space of two miles or more boiling along 

 deep and sullen between two sheer walls of pure white 

 marble, a hundred feet in height, must form a scene 

 of rare loveliness. J3ut in a bustling, dusty, Oriental 

 land, the charm of coolness and cpiiet belonging to 

 these pure cold rocks, and deep and blue and yet pellucid 

 waters, is almost entrancing. The eye never wearies 

 of the infinite variety of effect produced by the broken 

 and reflected sunlight, now glancing from a pinnacle 

 of snow-white marble reared against the deep blue 

 of the sky as from a point of silver ; touching here and 

 there with bright lights the prominences of the middle 

 heights ; and again losing itself in the soft bluish grays 

 of their recesses. Still lower down, the bases of the 

 cliffs are almost lost in a hazy shadow, so that it is hard 

 to tell at what jooint the rocks have melted into the 

 water, from whose dej)ths the same lights in reverse 

 order are reflected as clear as above, but broken into 

 a thousand quivering fragments in the swirl of the pool. 



Here and there the white saccharine limestone is 

 seamed by veins of dark green or black volcanic rock ; 



