278 KING: KADAPAH AND KARNÜL FORMATIONS. [PART IV. 
of the Kurnool Canal will, however, give a cheap means of transport if 
there be eventually any demand for this ore. 
There is one furnace at Ramulkota where iron ore is smelted and 
ion ae one! afterwards purified. The ore is a massive roughly 
mu granular specular iron, coarsely crystallized and 
very brilliant on a broken surface. It is of a blackish grey color. It 
is brought from the adjacent Gunnygull hill. Iron is smelted once in 
a month, during 24 hours. The furnace is charged seven times during 
this day and night; when seven lumps of smelted metal are obtained. 
The furnace is charged first (a fire being at the bottom) with 
powdered charcoal. Two large baskets (6 or 7 large Madras measures) 
of chareoal are thrown on the fire; then a small basket of pounded 
ore (74 seers) and 6 small baskets of charcoal, that is, about a handful 
of iron and a handful of charcoal alternately, at about an interval of 
a minute. Nothing else is put in the furnace. The bellows are kept at 
work for about two or three hours. Then the soft mass of metal is 
raked out; beaten for a short time with heavy hammers until it assumes 
the rounded wedge-shaped form usually given to the lump of iron at 
native furnaees, a deep cut being made in the mass. This lump of 
metal is about three quarters of the weight of pounded ore placed in the 
furnace; and it is worth three rupees. Afterwards it is reduced to bars 
of workable iron, by being heated four times in the forge and beaten 
between each heating. The furnace is a small dome-shaped edifice, 
almost exactly like the furnaces of the Salem district, both in shape and 
size. 
There are numerous localities all down the western edge of the field 
from: whence iron ore is brought down into the 
ode ae country below the scarps. In general the ore is 
some variety of hematite. On the eastern side of the Khoond-air valley, 
which is an iron smelting region, the form of ore worked by the people 
is a massive shaly iron sandstone, mainly made up of peroxide, which 
Cmr) 
