CEREALS 63 



These circumstances greatly complicate the preparation 

 of- crop returns in India; and another difficulty consists 

 in the smallness and multitude of agricultural holdings. 

 The crops are grown mainly for internal consumption, 

 and are cultivated broadcast throughout a vast sub- 

 continent. Some of the patches lurk in remote recesses 

 of the jungle, and others perch on inaccessible ridges of 

 great mountains. In the Himalayan tracts one looks 

 sheer down from the pine-clad heights, and through rifts 

 in a shifting veil of clouds, upon dwarfed and sun- 

 dappled mountain ranges, thousands of feet below, which 

 in any other part of the world would themselves seem 

 stupendous; and one sees that all their sides and buttresses 

 are scored and contoured with a thousand narrow terraces 

 built by successive generations to preserve the soil from 

 being washed away. At the end of the rains the spectacle 

 is astonishing in the vividness of the colour, for here 

 some of the crops are of a uniform blazing crimson or 

 scarlet or gold, and the flat roofs are covered with the 

 orange and saffron of drying maize. The villages and 

 farms and fields appear so near and yet so infinitely small 

 that it is difficult to believe them real. And when one 

 considers what must be the task of the officer who should 

 attempt to estimate the aggregate area of all those 

 snippets of land, cut and carved into a thousand diverse 

 forms and sizes to suit the contours of the hills, one 

 becomes tolerant of some inexactness. 



Another spectacle which to the pure statistician has 

 some of the horror of a nightmare, and which a visitor 

 to India might regard as an hallucination, is that of two 

 bullocks and a man (all nearly submerged) who move to 

 and fro in the middle of one of India's vast rivers swollen 

 by the monsoon rains. One passes the strange team in 

 a launch, and there is not a speck of solid ground 

 apparent within a quarter of a mile of them. But they 

 are ploughing the bed of the subsiding river in order 

 that seed may be sown as soon as the mud bank begins 

 to show. They have waded out by a long diagonal spit 

 not visible to us; and in the evening we may see the man 

 stumbling homewards through the water, driving before 

 him his pair of bullocks with the inverted wooden plough 



