112 THE HIGHLANDS OP CENTEAL INDIA. 



with the young Thakur and a few of the Korkus, by a way that 

 led right over the top of Dhupgarh. After walking along the 

 open plateau for about three miles w T e commenced the ascent 

 of the hill, which is close on 1000 feet above the plateau. 

 The zigzag track was hardly distinguishable among the grass 

 and bamboos that clothe the hill ; and every here and there a 

 road had to be cleared with the axe, no one having passed 

 that way since the preceding rainy season, when all vestiges 

 of paths in these hills become obliterated. We were amply 

 rewarded, however, for the climb by the magnificent prospect 

 that awaited us when we gained the summit the finest by far 

 in all this range of hills. The further slope of Dhupgarh was 

 not nearly so precipitous as that we had come up, but fell, by 

 steps as it were, to the bottom of a deep and extensive glen, 

 which was the one we were about to beat. Beyond this 

 again rose the mural cliff that buttresses the who]e of this 

 block to the south ; and far past this, to the left, stretched 

 out below us the wilderness of forest-clad hills, that reaches 

 with scarcely a break to the Tapti river a distance, as the 

 crow flies, of sixty or seventy miles. All this immense waste 

 is the chosen home of the bison ; and beyond it, on either 

 side of the Tapti, on the elevated Chikalda range, and in the 

 wild hills of Kalibhit, lies another tract of equally wide 

 extent, where, too, the mountain bull roams, as yet scarcely 

 troubled with the presence of man or cattle. This is the 

 region of the Teak tree par excellence in this central range 

 of mountains, to which I will have the pleasure of conducting 

 the reader in a future chapter. 



Tracks of bison and sambar were numerous on the top of 

 the hill, which is covered with bamboo clumps and with a 

 low thicket of the bastard date.* I have frequently, on other 



* Phoenix sylvestris. 



