38 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTEAL INDIA. 



" No barbarous drums shall be my wakening rude ; 

 The jungle cock shall crow my sweet reveille." 



For the first five marches (82 miles), my route lay down 

 the open and well-cultivated valley of the Narbada\ In the 

 first march I went off the highway to pay a last visit to a 

 remarkable scene of beauty, a few miles to the south of the 

 road. What visitor to Jubbulpiir can ever forget the Marble 

 Eocks ! In any country, a mighty river pent up into a third 

 of its width, and for a space of two miles or more boiling 

 along deep and sullen between two sheer walls of pure white 

 marble, a hundred feet in height, must form a scene of rare 

 loveliness. But in a bustling, dusty, oriental land, the charm 

 of coolness and quiet belonging to these pure cold rocks, and 

 deep and blue and yet pellucid waters, is almost entrancing. 

 The eye never wearies of the infinite variety of effect produced 

 by the broken and reflected sunlight, now glancing from a 

 pinnacle of snow-white marble reared against the deep blue of 

 the sky as from a point of silver ; touching here and there 

 with bright lights the prominences of the middle heights ; and 

 again losing itself in the soft bluish greys of their recesses. 

 Still lower down, the bases of the cliffs are almost lost in a 

 hazy shadow, so that it is hard to tell at what point the rocks 

 have melted into the water, from whose depths the same lights 

 in inverse order are reflected as clear as above, but broken into 

 a thousand quivering fragments in the swirl of the pool. 



Here and there the white saccharine limestone is seamed by 

 veins of dark green or black volcanic rock ; a contrast which 

 only enhances, like a setting of jet, the purity of the surround- 

 ing marble. The visitor to these Marble Eocks is poled up 

 through the gorge in a flat-bottomed punt as far as the " fall 

 of smoke," where the Narbada makes her first plunge into the 

 mighty rift ; and there is no difficulty in dreaming away the 



