98 TWO YEARS IN THE JUNGLE. 



specks, but with the glass we easily made them out. Dressing 

 hastily, we were soon on our way up the steep side, and after an 

 hour's steady and laborious cHmbing we reached the summit, made 

 a careful stalk over, and found — nothing. All that day and the 

 next also we climbed up and down those peaks, hunted along dan- 

 gerous precipices and rocky ridges, but found no animals. We 

 were so high that clouds enveloped us more than haK the time and 

 greatly retarded our progress. They enabled us to realize what a 

 wet, cold, and disagreeable thing a cloud is, when one is in it, how- 

 ever beautiful it may look from below. 



On the third day we moved six miles to the northeast, and 

 pitched our tent in the edge of a fine shola at the moiith of a small 

 cave in the rocks, low down beside a clear running brook, where 

 we were quite sheltered from the wind. A hundred yards awaj', 

 up the grassy slope, was a tj^ical Toda village, or " mund," called 

 Muddimund, and I was glad of so good an opportunity to make 

 the acquaintance of these strange people. After all, the Todas are 

 the most interesting animals on the Neilgherries, and before them 

 wild goats and sambur sink into insignificance. 



The Todas of the mund regarded our camping so near them as 

 a sort of invasion of their premises, and their suspicion of us rose 

 to positive dislike when, on the second day, they discovered our 

 coolies had stolen a couple of dry rails from their cattle-pen and 

 cut them up for firewood. Of course it was a perfectly lawless 

 act, and I quite admired the spirit of one of the men who came 

 down to inform us of the fact, and threaten to have our men up for 

 theft if the offence was repeated. As he stood upon a bare rock 

 above our camp, with a long staff in his hand,' clad only in a loin 

 cloth and a cloudy cotton sheet worn somewhat like a toga, with 

 bare arms and legs, and a mass of long, jet-black hair falling in 

 apostolic fashion over his shoulders, he seemed like another "John 

 the Baptist preaching in the wilderness." He soon convinced us 

 of the error of our ways, and a couple of rupees not only acted like 

 oil uj)on the troubled waters, but rendered him both friendly and 

 communicative. 



The Todas are certainly a remarkable tribe, but their qualities 

 are all of a negative character. Their history — which is really a 

 history of nothing — goes to show that the natural laws which gov- 

 ern the progress of aU other races and tribes of mankind do not af- 

 fect them in the least. Man is a progressive being, whose gradual 

 ascent in the scale of intelligence and refinement depends largely 



