THE NARBADA VALLEY. 35 



wild country, occupies no great time. Since the return of 

 my regiment to quarters a year or so before, I had been 

 almost constantly out on detachment duty, or on shooting 

 excursions ; and had added little to the modest properties I 

 found myself possessed of at the close of some three years of 

 camping out in the sub-Himalayan Terae, and subsequent 

 hunting up of skulking rebels over the stony wastes of Bandel- 

 kand. There are two ways of travelling in such tracts. The 

 one is to take a full equipment of the large tents and their 

 luxurious furnishings, which render marching about in India, 

 under ordinary circumstances, so little attended by hardship, 

 or even by inconvenience ; a corresponding train of servants 

 and baggage animals ; and a small army of horse and foot as 

 a protection. Such a camp will perhaps number from fifty to 

 eighty men, and half that number of animals of sorts. An 

 array like this may be allowable or even proper for the civil 

 officer, who has the dignity of his office to maintain, while 

 traversing slowly a populous and well-supplied district of the 

 plains. But the hardship of such an infliction on scattered 

 tribes of poor and resourceless aborigines is sometimes forcibly 

 brought home to the invaders, by finding the country, as they 

 advance, utterly deserted in their track. When I come to 

 describe the extreme poverty in resource of these outlying 

 tracts, this circumstance will perhaps be more easy to 

 realise. 



In my shooting excursions I had always marched with only 

 a single small tent, about eight feet square, of the sort called 

 a Pdl, which is composed of two or three thicknesses of com- 

 mon double-thread country cloth, sewn together, and thrown 

 over a ridge-pole on two uprights, all of the hollow (female) 

 bamboo, which combines strength with lightness in the highest 

 possible degree, It has no doors nor windows, but one of the 



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