4 KING : COASTAL REGION OF THE GODAVARI DISTRICT. 



he had no technical knowledge which could have enabled him to give 

 reliable details, and Benza's observations were in some respects inaccurate : 

 thus the relations of the beds are not correctly stated, and some 

 erroneous conclusions were drawn therefrom which shall be noticed in 

 their proper place. 



Topography. — The country under description has somewhat a lozenge- 

 shaped outline, with its longer diagonal striking east-north-east from 

 the neighbourhood of Bezvada, on the Kistna, to a point on the 

 sea-coast, about 45 miles south-west of Vizagapatam. From this point 

 the shore forms one edge, running still south-west to about the 16° 20' 

 parallel of north latitude, which parallel, again, is the southern edge of 

 the field. The two other sides, namely, those on the north and north- 

 west, meet in that part of the Eastern Ghats culminating at over 

 2,400 feet in the Raurkonda and Papakonda range, which is here crossed 

 by the grand gorge of the Godavari. 



The larger and central town is Rajahmundry^next comes Coconada 1 the 

 sea-port and zillah station, and the minor towns are Bezvada and Ellore. 



Thysical geography. — The country is mainly low -lying and alluvial, 

 more than half of it consisting of the deltaic deposits of the Godavari 

 and a portion of those of the Kistna, and this is to the north-east 

 joined on to a wide stretch of the alluviums of the minor streams on the 

 edge of the Vizagapatam district. From this flat there is then a gra- 

 dual rise which is broken by many small hills and groups of these, more 

 especially in the Rampa country, until the greater masses of the Kaur- 

 konda-Papakonda range are reached. 



The uniform level of the great alluvial plain is broken by a large out- 

 lier of gently rising ground, an island as it were in 

 the alluvium, at either end of which lie the towns 



1 I have accented the name here, though it is not marked so in the official list, the 

 proper name heing Kakinada (the place of crows). Of course, it must he often rather diffi- 

 cult for strangers to tell how these Indian names should he pronounced; and a story totbis 

 effect is told of a child of a former collector of the place, who was rather taken aback on 

 entering school in England at finding himself corrected in his pronunciation of the name 

 of the town in which be was born, which the master improved into Cocanada, as though it 

 were related to our possession in America. 

 ( 1»8 ) 



