214 NILGHIEI HILLS. 



the different nature of the two great physical agents which have 

 operated in giving form to the hills on the surface, and to those forming 

 the edge of the table land. 



It has been already mentioned that the gorges which break up the 

 lateral faces of the hills, and up which the princi- 



Lateral gorges due to 



fiesb-watei- action. pg,! roads are carried, have been cut out by the 



attrital action of the streams flowing down from the plateau They have, 

 therefore, the precipitous sides, and are separated by the steep ridges 

 which always result from extensive fresh-water denudation in a mountain- 

 ous country. The surface of the Neelgherries, on the 



Character of the sur- 

 face, other hand, is undulating in the extreme, and the 



streams which carry off its drainage, meander with a comparatively 

 gentle fall through rounded grassy hills, but rarely forming any thing hke 

 a large rocky l)luff, wliile the valleys never present the slightest approach 

 to the character of a gorge except in some of the deeper valleys of the 

 Kundahs, where, from causes to be explained in the following pages, 

 the rainfall is far greater than on the surface of the Neelgherries 

 proper, and the denudation produced thereby consequently greater. 

 It might be inferred, therefore, even from a casual glance at the Neel- 

 gherries, that the hills on the plateau owe their 



Due to marine action. 



form to marine action, it being a well established 

 fact, that rounded hills, and an undulating country, are invariably the 

 results of such action. But on the Neelgherries we have a further 

 proof that the sea has formerly washed over what is now the highest 

 portion of the table land, in the existence of a series of escarpments, 

 Old marine escarp- imperfect indeed in many cases, and much cut up 

 ™'^"*''' by the subsequent action of surface water, but still 



distinctly recognizable to the practised eye, and sometimes traceable 

 for a distance of many miles continuously. The most conspicuous of 

 these superficial escarpments crosses the hills in a S. W. direction from 

 the rise of the Pykara near Makurty Peak, and forms the boundary 



