220 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDLV. 



grass turns from green to yellow, and bristles with a 

 terrible armature of prickles, like needles of steel with 

 the barbs of a fish-hook, which catch in each other and 

 mat together into masses. Woe betide the undefended 

 pedestrian in grass like this. Unless defended by 

 leather, before he has gone half a mile every stitch of 

 his clothing will be run through and through, and 

 pinned to his flesh by multitudes of these barbs, 

 causing the most intolerable pain. The foliage of the 

 Salei withers and droops after a few weeks of sunning ; 

 and its naked yellow stems then fill the prospect like a 

 vast army of skeletons. But this stage is not even the 

 worst. It continues till the month of April introduces 

 the torrid summer season, when the fierce sun laps up 

 the last particle of moisture in these basaltic regions. 

 Then the grass has become like tinder, and a thousand 

 accidents may set it on fire. The traveller dropping a 

 light from his pipe, the wind carrying a spark from an 

 encampment of jungle-haunting Banjaras, the torch of 

 the belated traveller, and, should it escape these acci- 

 dents, then certainly the deliberate act of the graziers, 

 who bring herds of cattle with the first fall of rain in 

 June into these tracts to graze on the resulting new 

 crop of grass, will start a jungle fire which nothing can 

 stop till it burns itself out. Early in the hot season it 

 is a fine sight to watch at night the long creeping red 

 lines of the jungle fires on distant hill-sides. From the 

 hill fortress of Asirgarh the eye ranges over the whole 

 of the upper Tapti valley ; and at this season the whole 

 country appears at night ringed with these lines of fire, 

 curving with the curvature of hills ; here thin and 

 scarcely visible where the grass is scanty on a bare 

 hill-top ; there flaring through tracts of long elephant 



