Manchester Memoirs, Vol. Ix. (191 6), No. <>. 13 



only as far as the affluents of the Indus render the land 

 arable by irrigation."*' Miss Sykes speaks of terraced 

 irrigation between the Mashkid and Rakshan valleys in 

 Baluchistan. "All about this part of the country were 

 traces of a once wide-spread civilisation and the ruins of 

 many apparently large towns. The whole of the valleys 

 were terraced, tier upon tier of low slate walls often reach- 

 ing some way up the sides of the hills." 34 



Irrigated terraces are found in Ceylon, where they 

 extend right up the sides of the mountains and are 

 accompanied by extensive irrigation works. 



The Ho Mundas of Chota Nagpur have terraced irriga- 

 tion. " . . . the terraced don lands testify to the dogged 

 perseverance and indefatigable industry of the Mundas. 

 Years of patient labour of whole families of Mundas were 

 spent in embanking hill-streams, levelling river-beds and 

 valleys, cutting into stubborn ground higher up, and 

 forming them into little terraces of don lands. Generation 

 after generation of Mundas have toiled in the heat and in 

 the rain to prepare their terraced rice-fields. And still 

 they go on patiently reclaiming waste lands and prepar- 

 ing don lands, as their forefathers had done before them." 3n 



The Khonds of Orissa have village fields " formed in 

 a succession of terraces, to which water is conducted with 

 no mean skill." 36 The hill villages of Madras are also 

 surrounded by terraced fields running along the sides of 

 the valleys. The Coorg system of terraced cultivation 

 takes place, we are told, " in the narrower valleys near the 

 Ghats, where the ground is terraced with considerable 



;J;: Semple, p. 359. 



• 4 Herbertson, op. cit '., p. 113, quoting from Macqueen, "Through 

 Persia in a side-saddle." 



35 Sarat Chundra Roy. "The Mundas and their country." Calcutta, 

 191 2, p. 390. 



36 Gomme,o/>, cit., quoting from Campbell, "Wild tribes of Khondistan." 



