THE TEAK KEGION. 229 



scarcely room for the path we were treading. It was a terrible 

 business getting the baggage camels along these narrow places, 

 studded as they were with trees, and encumbered with boulders 

 of trap ; and though we had a number of Bheels with axes to 

 clear a passage for them they did not get in till nightfall. 

 The views at the turns where the plains on both sides could 

 be seen were remarkable, though scarcely to be called pic- 

 turesque. At our feet steep hill-sides of crumbling basalt, 

 covered with long yellow grass beaten almost flat by the 

 western blasts that sweep the hills at this season, and studded 

 over with large black boulders and the naked yellow stems of 

 the Salei tree. Above, short scarps of dark grey trap leading 

 up to the flat tops of the range ; and below, so near looking 

 that you would expect a stone thrown over to light on it, and 

 yet so far beneath that towns and groves and corn fields 

 were all melted in one indistinguishable blue haze, the long 

 level cotton-yielding plains of Berar. 



At Bingara the Mahomedan Nawdbs of Berar had, some 

 hundreds of years ago, constructed a pleasure house after their 

 earnest fashion, which, despite the effects of a destructive 

 climate, and the searching roots of the peepul and banyan 

 figs, remains to this day, though probably never repaired, an 

 example of the solidity of their style of construction. The 

 massive domes, thick walls, and narrow openings combine in 

 these buildings to form the coolest structures to be found 

 in India. The building at Bingara is erected on the banks of 

 a small artificial lake, the waters of which, however, now 

 escape a good deal through the rotten embankment, leaving 

 behind a slime which by no means adds to the attractions of 

 the place. The building itself was the habitation of bats and 

 owls ; and so we pitched our little tent a short way back from 

 the lake under the shade of some immense banyan trees 



