THE TEAK REGION". 247 



tagonal pillars standing together and broken off at 

 different lengths. This singularly favourable situation 

 for nest building had been occupied by an immense 

 colony of vultures, the whole face of the rock for miles 

 being whitened by their droppings, while numbers of 

 the birds were perched on the cliff or sailing over the 

 ravine. Among them were a good many of the common 

 brown carrion vulture;* but the majority were the 

 foul white scavengers t to be seen on every dunghill in 

 the villages of the plains. I had often wondered where 

 these birds bred, for although there are myriads in all 

 inhabited tracts of Central India only a few nests are to 

 be seen here and there in the tops of trees. Here was 

 the puzzle solved, in the grim and retired solitude of 

 the Valley of the Vultures. But a single hill — a few 

 minutes' flight — separated them here from the thickly 

 peopled plain where they find their repulsive food ; and 

 yet that ravine is probably as seldom looked on by the 

 eye of man as if it were a guano island in the Pacific 

 Ocean. 



A few weeks after our unsuccessful trip to the Hatti 

 hills, 1 heard from T. that the grass was mostly burnt, 

 iiud sambar were plentiful on the northern slope of the 

 hills. He had also come across a preserve of bison, out 

 of which he had bagged a bull. Early in April, there- 

 fore, I rode out to his camp at Chondi — one of the 

 deserted village sites in the valley below Gharri. A 

 lovelier spot for a hunting camp in the hot weather 

 could not be found. Close by a clear and beautiful 

 pool of water stood an enormous banyan tree, so old 

 tha.t many of the suckers thrown out by the branches of 

 the parent tree had themselves become mighty stems, 

 * Gyps Bengalensis. f Neoplium Perenopterua. 



