THE TEAK EEGION. 227 



dense population, who pay for their dry and unfertile acres the 

 rent that in many places is given for irrigated sugar-cane land. 

 Within a natural reservoir, fed by the drainage of forty square 

 miles, and only wanting an embankment of a few hundred yards 

 to hold back sufficient water to convert the whole of the plain 

 without into an evergreen garden. Such sites as these, though 

 not always so favoured by a combination of circumstances as 

 this one, are met with at intervals along almost the whole of 

 the frontier line between the highlands and the open plain. 

 But, alas ! the means at the command of so poor a country as 

 India are unequal to the task of realising her own future ; 

 and the wealth of life-giving water that annually escapes 

 through these unguarded outlets must still, for many a genera- 

 tion, it may be feared, be allowed to waste itself in destructive 

 inundations and fruitless floods. We are only just beginning 

 to realise that at the bottom of all India's wretched poverty 

 and backwardness lies the exceeding unfertility of her 

 land in the absence of artificial irrigation. A return of 

 wheat no more than four or fivefold the seed, and but forty 

 pounds of clean cotton to the acre, from the deep black 

 soils of the Narbada valley, such is the boasted fertility 

 of one of the finest tracts of soil in all India ! What might 

 be the changes in the physical conditions and economy of 

 India were the annual rainfall saved which now escapes to 

 the sea it is impossible to foresee. An almost incredible 

 increase in the productiveness of the low country, and the 

 final banishment of the famine demon that now claims its an- 

 nual thousands and quinquennial millions throughout the land, 

 would probably be combined with a great amelioration of the 

 climate, and improvement of the forests of the higher regions.* 



* I would not here be understood to affirm the opinion that such a country as 

 the bulk of the Central Provinces are as yet ripe for large irrigation works. A 



q2 



