90 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA. 



the cave of the shrine I am about to describe, and which, 

 I think, eventually falls into the Koh under the scarp of 

 Chd,urddeo. 



Legend has made the Andeh-K6h the retreat of a monstrous 

 serpent, which formerly inhabited a lake on the plateau, and 

 vexed the worshippers of Mah&deo, till the god dried up the 

 serpent's lake, and imprisoned the snake himself in this rift, 

 formed by a stroke of his trident in the solid rock. It needs 

 no very ingenious interpreter of legend to see in this wild 

 story an allusion to the former settlements of * Buddhists 

 (referred to as snakes in Brahminical writings) on the Puch- 

 murree hill, and their extinction on the revival of Brahmanism 

 in the sixth or seventh century. Certain it is that there once 

 was a considerable lake in the centre of the plateau, formed 

 by a dam thrown across a narrow gorge, and that on its banks 

 are still found numbers of the large flat bricks used in ancient 

 buildings, while in the overhanging rocks are cut five caves 

 (whence the name of Puchmurree), of the character usually 

 attributed to the Buddhists. Beneath the lower end of the 

 lake lies a considerable stretch of almost level land, on which 

 are still traceable the signs of ancient tillage, in the form of 

 embankments and water-courses. Looking from the portico 

 of the rock-cut caves, it is not difficult for the imagination to 

 travel back to the time when the lower margin of the lake 

 was surrounded by the dwellings of a small, perhaps an exiled 

 and persecuted, colony of Buddhists, practising for their sub- 

 sistence the art, strange in these wilds, of civilized cultivation 

 of the earth, and to hear again the sound of the evening bell 

 in their little monastery floating away up the placid surface of 

 the winding lake. 



Another very striking ravine, called Jambo-Dwip, lies on 

 the opposite side of the plateau from the Andeh-K6h. About 



