HISTORIC BANYAN TREE. 197 



India, which are regarded by the natives as sacred 

 memorials of the Divine beneficence. The stump of 

 the famous "Akshai Bar," or Undecaying Banyan tree, 

 is still an object of worship at Allahabad, and the 

 presentation of a single piece of money at the temple 

 there is supposed to procure as much merit as a 

 thousand pieces elsewhere. * Also on the island in the 

 river Nerbudda at Shukltirth, near Bharach (or Broach) 

 stands a celebrated banyan tree, called the "Kabir 

 Vat" or the Fig tree of Kabir, which according to 

 Forbes, is supposed to be the same tree as that 

 described by 'Nearchus', the admiral of Alexander 

 the Great (Tempo, about 327 B.C.). f This tree, it is 

 said, " once covered an area so immense as to shelter 

 7000 men," and, "though now much reduced in size 

 by destructive floods, the remainder is still nearly 2000 

 feet in circumference, and the trunks exceed 3000 in 

 number. " A writer who visited this tree in 1819 

 states that, 



" its lofty arches and colonnades, its immense festoons of 

 roots, the extent of ground it covered, and its enormous 

 trunks, proclaimed its great antiquity and struck him with 

 awe, similar to that inspired by a fine gothic cathedral. I 

 should," he says, "guess it to cover from three to four acres, 

 and the fresh green of its thick foliage shows that it is still 

 in the vigour of life. Its branches rise so high that many 

 miles off it is a conspicuous object, standing out like a hill 

 on the end of the island."** 



The author of these pages himself made a pilgrim- 

 age to this great wonder of the vegetable creation, 



* Murray's Handbook for India and Ceylon, 1892, p. 38. 

 f Oriental Memories, by Forbes, 1783, Vol. i, p. 26. 

 Encycl. Brit. Vol., iii., p. 348 (gth edit.). 

 ** Transactions of the Bombay Literary Society. 



