208 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA. 



utterly dried up. The grass turns from green to yellow, 

 and bristles with a terrible armature of prickles, like needles 

 of steel with the barbs of a fish-hook, which catch in 

 each other and mat together into masses. Woe betide the 

 undefended pedestrian in grass like this. Unless defended 

 by leather, before he has gone half a mile every stitch 

 of his clothing will be run through and through, and pinned 

 to his flesh by multitudes of these barbs, causing the most 

 intolerable pain. The foliage of the Salei withers and droops 

 after a few weeks of sunning ; and its naked yellow stems then 

 fill the prospect like a vast army of skeletons. But this stage 

 is not even the worst. It continues till the month of April 

 introduces the torrid summer season, when the fierce sun laps 

 up the last particle of moisture in these basaltic regions. Then 

 the grass has become like tinder, and a thousand accidents may 

 set it on fire. The traveller dropping a light from his pipe, the 

 wind carrying a spark, from an encampment of jungle-haunt- 

 ing Banjaras, the torch of the belated traveller, and, should it 

 escape these accidents, then certainly the deliberate act of the 

 graziers who bring herds of cattle with the first fall of rain in 

 June into these tracts to graze on the resulting new crop of 

 grass, will start a jungle fire which nothing can stop till it 

 burns itself out. Early in the hot season it is a fine sight to 

 watch at night the long creeping red lines of the jungle fires 

 on distant hill-sides. From the hill fortress of Asirgarh the 

 eye ranges over the whole of the upper Tapti valley ; and at 

 this season the whole country appears at night ringed with 

 these lines of fire, curving with the curvature of hills ; 

 here thin and scarcely visible where the grass is scanty on a 

 bare hill-top ; there flaring through tracts of long elephant 

 grass, or wrapping some dried and sapless tree-stem in im- 

 mense tongues of flame. By night a ruddy glow colours all 



