20 J. Be&mes— The Alti Hills in Cuttach. [No. 1, 



Alti is unfortunately very inaccessible. The parganah of that name, in 

 which, the hills are situated, is surrounded and intersected by rivers. On 

 the north-east flows the Kimiriya, an offshoot of the Brahmani, on the south 

 the Birupa, an arm of the Mahanadi. These two unite at the south-east 

 angle of the parganah and form a third river the Kelua, and the whole 

 tract is further cut in two by the Ganguti, a stream which issues from the 

 Birupa in the south-west and falls into the Kimiriya just above its junction 

 with the Birupa. Thus a river has to be crossed in reaching the hills from 

 any direction, and as there are very few boats on the Orissa rivers, and 

 those that do exist are not suitable for crossing horses, it is a difficult busi- 

 ness to reach them. The hills or rather hill, for it is only one, lies between 

 the Ganguti and the Birupa, about 30 miles north-east of the town of Cut- 

 tack. To the south of the Birupa, and about 3 miles from the main mass 

 of Alti, lies the Nalti group, consisting of one long hog-backed hill with a 

 depression in the centre and a small knoll rather isolated on its southern 

 side. The derivation of the name of this hill from oaaJ, ' a curse', and the 

 legend connected with it, seem to be a pure invention of some marvel-loving 

 and ingenious Muhammadan. The name is not Nalti, which would be the 

 Uriya inversion of La'nati, but Nalti with short a, and seems to correspond 

 to Alti just as the two parganahs of Awartak and Anawartak a little fur- 

 ther to the south, where the prefix an (Sanskrit W^f) means " small," so 

 that Nalti, for Analti or Anvalti, would simply mean "little Alti". If the 

 Hindus of Orissa had wished to designate the hill as cursed, they would not 

 have used a little known Arabic word like IcCnat, but their own ordinary 

 word s'rup ; nor is it likely that the very scanty and insignificant Musal- 

 man population would have been able to have affixed a name derived from an 

 obscure legend on the hill and Hindu village. The legend is of itself extra- 

 vagantly absurd ; for it was not the prophet Muhammad, as the Babu says, 

 who cursed the hill, but the great king Solomon. It is not the prophet 

 who is represented in Muslim legend as flying through the air, but king 

 Sulaiman-bin-Daud, whose magic ring gave him power over the Jins, and 

 who was in the habit of flying through the air on his magic prayer carpet. 

 The mosque on the Alti hill is called the " Takht i Sulaiman," and the 

 custodian thereof as he told me the legend, attributed the curse to Sulaiman. 



The antiquities noticed by the Babu on the Nalti hill are ruined tem- 

 ples too much dilapidated to yield any interesting results, with the excep- 

 tion of the temple mentioned at the bottom of page 159. I made a sketch 

 of this (plate V). The five figures of Buddha stand in niches on the outer 

 side of the walls of the cell, one of them is visible on the right hand of the 

 sketch. They are executed in bold relief on large slabs of gametic gueiss, 

 but the inscriptions are not visible, being concealed by the walls. The 

 temple itself is now dedicated to Basuli Thakurani, who is represented by a 



