210 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA. 



was in the days when the Mahomedan Viceroy of the Deccan 

 held court at the city of Burhanpiir, some fifty miles lower 

 down the valley, and great armies marching between the Dec- 

 can and Hindostan had to be fed. The bays in the valley are 

 still dotted over with the sites of the villages of those times, 

 and with the ruined forts and tombs and mosques of their 

 Mahomedan rulers. Near the ancient site of Sajni, the chief 

 town of one of these tracts, may be seen a banyan tree of im- 

 mense spread, whose trunk has embraced and lifted bodily up 

 from off the ground the domed masonry tomb, about twelve 

 feet in all dimensions, of some Moslem notable, and so en- 

 veloped it with its thousand folds that not one stone of it is to 

 be seen outside, while, passing inside by a narrow opening, 

 the arch of the dome and the wall will be seen to be almost 

 perfect. A Moslem could scarcely desire a fitter entombment 

 than to be suspended thus between heaven and earth, like the 

 prophet of his faith. 



It is now some seventy years since the malaria of the en- 

 croaching jungle and famine in the country caused by the 

 failure of the rains of heaven and the still more terrible strife 

 of men desolated these settlements in the Tapti valley. The 

 rank jungle then sprang on the deserted clearings, rendered 

 fertile to weed as to cereal by the labour of man, and has now 

 clothed them with a thicket of vegetation of such thickness, 

 and guarded by a miasma so deadly, as to baffle all attempts 

 at renewed occupation by the Hindu cultivators densely 

 crowded in the adjoining open country. Here and there the 

 Korkus, whose constitutions seem impervious to malaria, have 

 settled down on some neighbouring rising ground, and built a 

 neat little village of Swiss-like cottages of bamboo, and have 

 cleared and tilled the opener parts of the valley, raising such 

 crops of wheat on the unexhausted black soil as are the envy 



