INTRODUCTORY. 13 



assumed little of a practical character in the interior of the 

 hills, the mountaineers continuing to wage against them a 

 desultory warfare from their fastnesses. The present century 

 broke with the commencement of that "time of trouble," 

 when the leaders of the Maratha confederacy began to quarrel 

 over their spoil, and entered on a deadly struggle for territory 

 and power. The financial straits of the Maratha chiefs 

 now led to wholesale disregard for all rights of property 

 inconsistent with their demand of a rack-rent from every 

 acre of the soil commanded by their troops. The hill-chiefs 

 were now reft of the last of their possessions in the plains ; 

 corrupt and overbearing farmers of the land-tax seizing on 

 the last of their accessible resources. Then they took to the 

 hills with their tribes, and turned their hands against the 

 spoiler, till the name of G6nd and Bheel became synonymous 

 with that of hill-robber. Whole tracts came to be distin- 

 guished by the title of the " country of robbers." There is 

 not a district in all that long frontier between hill and plain 

 where tales are not still related of the sudden downswoop of 

 bands of hillmen on the garnered harvest of the plains, of 

 bloodshed, torture, and blazing villages, and of the sharp and 

 savage retaliation of Maratha mercenaries. A little tributary 

 of the Tapti river that comes down from the hills of Gavil- 

 garh is still called the " stream of blood," from the massacre 

 in its valley of a whole tribe of Nahals, man, woman, and 

 child, by a body of Arabs in the service of Sindia ; and many 

 similar tales have been related to me when travelling in the 

 hills. Then, if not before, every pass in the hills was crowned 

 by a fortified post of the mountain men, and every inhabited 

 village of the plains by a wall of earthwork and a central 

 keep. Then, too, arose the organised bands of mounted 

 plunderers who have been called Pindaris Ishmaelites of 



