172 ROUGHING IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA 



only for the safeguarding of property, the owners sleeping 

 in the verandah. 



A very curious and ingenious method of building, of which 

 I saw several instances in progress, is sometimes employed 

 by these people, instead of making bricks or availing them- 

 selves of the quarried laterite just mentioned. It consists 

 in the use of a composition of earth, clay, and shell mixed 

 with water and blood — to bind it ; this is put into oblong 

 wooden frames, two feet long and eight inches deep and 

 wide, which when packed are wedged tight by means of 

 iron clamps. After the mass has become firm the framework 

 is removed from round it, and it is then dried in the sun. 

 The houses constructed of these blocks are very quickly 

 ready, and are quite durable. If the building be in a great 

 hurry much larger frames are used ; the important point 

 is that the drying be thorough. 



Salt is so generally considered harmful to vegetable life 

 that when I mentioned the fact of cocoanut palms growing 

 in the sea, I ought to have added that they are more luxuriant 

 on coasts than elsewhere, sometimes attaining a height of 

 eighty feet, and loving a sandy soil ; indeed, to succeed at 

 all, these palms must at the beginning be watered with 

 brine, and that is a hard matter for inland people to com- 

 pass. Some of the poorest depend entirely upon their cocoa- 

 nut crop for a living, so it is more than a mere grievance 

 that salt should be the strictly guarded Government mon- 

 opoly that it is. The people are not even suffered to collect 

 by evaporation the small quantity of sea-salt that would 

 suffice for their personal needs and for the cultivation of 

 their plot of ground — they must buy all they want ! One 

 would imagine that, however much salt were taken from 

 the sea, plenty more would remain behind ; but that is not 

 the Government point of view, and the arm of its Salt 

 Department has a very long reach and a powerful hold. 

 It is no use at all for the people to assert what might be 



