104 KING: KADAPAH AND KARNÜL FORMATIONS. [PART If. 
It is now quite overgrown with bamboo forest, and the villagers have 
no recollection of the mines having been worked in 
their time. The bottom of the valley east of 
the village seems to have been thoroughly washed, for it is full of pits 
Busswapoor mines. 
which were once dug amongst the alluvial deposits, and around these 
are still evidence of the heaps of gravel and dug-out debris. The sides 
of the hills above are also often broken up in places, as is the case in the 
mining localities in other parts of the district. It is, however, exceed- 
ingly difficult to recognise anything like diamond beds here, for the 
whole country is made up of quartzites which are most of them cer- 
tainly of the older Kapapaus; and it is, besides being jungle-covered, 
much obscured by debris from the higher ranges of hills. I neverthe- 
less saw traces of a thin covering of quartzites lying unconformably on 
other altered sandstones and occasionally on the clay-slates which are 
associated with the older formation; and the rocks of this covering had 
evidently been broken up. I also at last found a lofty ridge, some dis- 
tance beyond the valley of mines, which is distinctly capped with other 
quartzites of grit, sandstone, and conglomerate. There is very little of 
this capping remaining now ; and I can only come to the conclusion that 
this is what is left of the “diamond group” in this part of the coun- 
try. This outlier shows beds of pebbly conglomerate and breccia with 
the same black, purple, green, red, and pale colored cherts and shales as 
are seen in strata of the known diamond group. 
There are other localities on this side of the Khoond-air valley, 
further to the south, as near the head of the valley leading up to 
Murlayconda from Madaypoor, and again on a low rounded ridge at 
Sultanpet a few miles south-south-east of Roodrar, where diamond beds 
might be found in the very decidedly marked quartzite strata of pebbly 
conglomerates and breccias with the usual included fragments of cherts, 
&e. But there are no traces of mines or any recollections of such 
( 104 ) 
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