122 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTEAL INDIA. 



destruction at the hands of the timber-speculator or the dhya- 

 cutting aborigine, being inaccessible to the former from want 

 of roads, and unsuited from its level character and the size of 

 the trees to the operations of the latter. It, however, affords an 

 example of one of the great difficulties of growing large timber 

 in the dry upland regions of Central India. Though the trees 

 bore every appearance of being fully mature, their size was by 

 no means first rate, the largest averaging no more than six or 

 eight feet in girth, while most of them when subsequently cut 

 down were found to be almost useless from heart-shake and dry 

 rot. At this time there was a great outcry for sleepers to lay the 

 Great Indian Peninsular Eailway line ; and it was important 

 to secure so promising a forest as this, both for present wants 

 and to be regularly worked on a proper system in after years. 

 It belonged to the Thakur of Puchmurree and another Chief ; 

 and I soon after concluded a lease of it for Government with 

 them, and laid out a road connecting it with the open country. 

 The view looking upwards to the Puchmurree heights from the 

 Denwa" valley, or across from the opposite Motur hills, is exceed- 

 ingly fine, the rich reds of the sandstone scarp mellowing 

 into an indescribable variety of delicate shades of purple and 

 violet in the evening sun, while broad belts of shadow thrown 

 across the green slopes at the foot, and gathering in the re- 

 cesses of the ravines, seem to project the glowing summits of 

 the rocks to an unnatural height in the soft orange-tinted 

 sky. 



Here I ascertained the existence of the Bara-Singha, or 

 twelve-tined deer (Rucervus Duvaucellii), an animal which, 

 like the Sal forest in which it lives, had been supposed 

 not to extend to the west of the Sal belt in the Mandla 

 district. I was not so fortunate as to shoot a stag myself 

 in this place ; but I shot two does, and saw a frontlet of the 



