410 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTKAL INDIA. 



break at intervals the torrent of these mountain rivers. 

 My companion bad got a severe attack of fever, which 

 marred what would otherwise have been a sufficiently 

 jolly trip. After resting awhile at this most secluded of 

 stations (they get their supplies from Calcutta, several 

 hundreds of miles away, on men's heads, and a convoy 

 had just been trampled up by wikl elephants before we 

 arrived), we started again for the Garhjat States, where 

 the next month was spent in unremitting toil among 

 their rushed hills. Here we were amono; the Khond 

 aborisfinies, famous for the Meria sacrifices of human 

 beings to the dread goddess Kali. How they can have 

 been confounded with our Central Indian Gonds I can- 

 not imagine. They are much blacker and more negro- 

 like in their jjhysique, and speak a wdioUy different 

 language, a few words only of which approximate, like 

 Gondi, to the Tamil of the south. Their country is 

 wholly beyond the limits of the central highlands ; and 

 it would be out of place to enter here into a detailed 

 description of the tribe, even did the few weeks I passed 

 among them justify such an undertaking. We returned 

 from this trip with most of our following severely ill of 

 fever, contracted in these close jungles, where water is 

 so scarce and bad at this time of year (April) that we 

 rose, like river gods, from our daily bath hung with the 

 green slime of the fetid pools from which our supplies 

 w^ere drawn. As we marched northward again we 

 entered the valley of the Jonk river, a tributary of 

 the Mahanadi, and here we fell in again with great 

 herds of buffaloes, and halted for a day or two to recruit 

 our fullowers and shoot. Our camp was pitched below 

 a great spreading tree at the deserted site of the village of 

 Jilda. Eaten up by the buffaloes, the people had moved 

 off to a less open space. Around us was a sea of long 



