234 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTEAL INDIA. 



different lengths. This singularly favourable situation for 

 nest building had been occupied by an immense colony of 

 vultures, the whole face of the rock for miles being whitened 

 by their droppings, while numbers of the birds were perched 

 on the cliff or sailing over the ravine. Among them were a 

 good many of the common brown carrion vulture ; * but the 

 majority were the foul white scavengers f to be seen on every 

 dunghill in the villages of the plains. I had often wondered 

 where these birds bred, for although there are myriads in all 

 inhabited tracts of Central India only a few nests are to be 

 seen here and there in the tops of trees. Here was the puzzle 

 solved, in the grim and retired solitude of the Valley of the 

 Vultures. But a single hill, a few minutes' flight, separated 

 them here from the thickly peopled plain where they find their 

 repulsive food ; and yet that ravine is probably as seldom 

 looked on by the eye of man as if it were a guano island in 

 the Pacific Ocean. 



A few weeks after our unsuccessful trip to the Hatti hills, I 

 heard from T. that the grass was mostly burnt, and sambar were 

 plentiful on the northern slope of the hills. He had also come 

 across a preserve of bison, out of which he had bagged a bull. 

 Early in April, therefore, I rode out to his camp at Chondi 

 one of the deserted village sites in the valley below Gharri. A 

 lovelier spot for a hunting camp in the hot weather could not be 

 found. Close by a clear and beautiful pool of water stood an 

 enormous banyan tree, so old that many of the suckers thrown 

 out by the branches of the parent tree had themselves become 

 mighty stems, with branches which again had given birth to 

 trunks of considerable girth, while the stem of the original 

 tree had utterly decayed away. Beneath its copious shade 

 were sheltered from the sun several tents, and numerous 



* Gyps Bengalensis. f Neophum Perenopterus. 



