96 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA. 



imagination to travel back to the time when the lower 

 margin of the lake was surrounded by the dwellings of 

 a small, perhaps an exiled and persecuted, colony of 

 Biiddhists, practising for their subsistence the art, 

 strange in these wilds, of civilised cultivation of the 

 earth, and to hear aoaiu the sound of the eveninof bell 

 in their little monastery floating away up the placid 

 surface of the windino- lake. 



Another very striking ravine, called Jambo-Dwip, 

 lies on the opposite side of the plateau from the Andeh- 

 Koh. About a thousand feet of steep descent, down a 

 track worn by the feet of pilgrims, leads to the entrance 

 of a gorge, whose aspect is singularly adapted to impress 

 the imagination of the pilgrim to these sacred hills. A 

 dense canopy of the wild mango tree, overlaid and 

 interlaced by the tree-like limbs of the giant creeper,* 

 almost shuts out the sun ; strange shapes of tree ferns 

 and thickets of dank and rotting vegetation cumber the 

 path ; a chalybeate stream, covered by a film of metallic 

 scum, reddens the ooze through which it slowly per- 

 colates ; a gloom like twilight shrouds the bottom of 

 the valley, from out of which rises on either hand a 

 towering crag of deep red colour, from the summit of 

 which stretch the ghostly arms of the white and naked 

 Sferculia urens, a tree that looks as if the megatherium 

 might have climbed its uncouth and ghastly branches at 

 the birth of the world. Further on, the gorge narrows 

 to a mere cleft between the high cliffs, wholly destitute 

 of veo-etation, and strewn with o;reat boulders. Climbino; 

 over these, and wading through the waters of a shallow 

 stream, the pilgrim at length reaches a cavern in the 

 rock, the sides and bottom of which have been, by some 

 * Bauldnia scandens. 



