•222 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTEAL INDIA. 



moist substratum that is never entirely parched up, and 

 carrying a greener grass which it is hard to burn, and 

 often a coverino; of forest trees. Most of these tracts 

 have been at one time reclaimed to the plough, 

 and thickly populated. That was in the days when 

 the Mahomedan Viceroy of the Deccan held court at 

 the city of Burhanpiir, some fifty miles lower down 

 the valley, and great armies marching between the 

 Deccan and Hindostan had to be fed. The bays in 

 the valley are still dotted over with the sites of the 

 villages of those times, and with the ruined forts and 

 tombs and mosques of their Mahomedan rulers. Near 

 the ancient site of Sajni, the chief town of one of 

 these tracts, may be seen a banyan tree of immense 

 spread, whose trunk has embraced and lifted bodily 

 up from ofi" the ground the domed masonry tomb, about 

 twelve feet in all dimensions, of some Moslem notable, 

 and so enveloped it with its thousand folds that not one 

 stone of it is to be seen outside, while, passing inside by 

 a narrow opening, the arch of the dome and the wall will 

 be seen to be almost perfect. A Moslem could scarcely 

 desire a fitter entombment than to be suspended thus 

 between heaven and earth, like the prophet of his fiiith. 

 It is now some years since the malaria of the en- 

 croaching jungle and famine in the country, caused by 

 the failure of the rains of heaven and the still more 

 terrible strife of men, desolated these settlements in the 

 Tapti valley. The rank jungle then sprang on the 

 deserted clearings, rendered fertile to weed as to cereal 

 by the labour of man, and has now clothed them wdtli 

 a thicket of vegetation of such thickness, and guarded 

 by a miasma so deadly, as to baffle all attempts at 

 renewed occupation by the Hindii cultivators densely 



