THE TEAK EEGION. 233 



also proved too thick for our boundary operations, we 

 determined to retreat to the plains. But we were unwilling 

 to return by the awful road we had come ; and, a possible 

 way down the northern face of the hill being reported, 

 we left Dhowtea behind us the next morning, march- 

 ing along the top of the range for eight or ten miles 

 to a place called Jamti, the residence of another of these 

 petty Bheel chieftains, and marked by a conspicuous banyan 

 tree which is visible from every part of the surrounding 

 country. Thence we descended the next day to the Tapti 

 valley, intending to return to the hills when the jungle should 

 be clearer. The truth was we had happened to visit Dhowtea 

 just when nearly all the sambar had gone down the hills to 

 feed on some jungle fruits that had ripened in the valleys ; 

 and the few that remained were not to be found among the 

 long unburnt grass. I believe that the immense number of 

 marks we saw were caused by the collection of large numbers 

 of deer there during the rutting season (late autumn). I 

 intended to investigate this had I remained in that part of 

 the country; but neither of us ever got back there again. 

 T. is, I believe, now surveying in the Himalayas, and I am in 

 old Scotland, content with much smaller game than sdmbar. 

 " Such is life," as the poet says ! 



The path we went down by wound along the top of a long 

 spur of naked basalt. On either side were deep and almost 

 coal-black rifts in the rock, the summits clothed scantily with 

 thin yellow grass, and here and there a Salei tree stunted and 

 twisted like a corkscrew. At one point the rock assumed the 

 form of a sheer cliff, many hundred feet in height, of the 

 columnar structure seen occasionally in this volcanic forma- 

 tion, where the rock seems composed of a vast conglomeration 

 of pentagonal pillars standing together and broken off at 



