32 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTEAL INDIA 



composed the regiment, one of the first of the force that 

 rose on the ruins of the Bengal army in 1857. But 

 soldiering in India, in time of peace, is truly one of the 

 dreariest of occupations; and I confess I was far from 

 doleful at the prospect of quitting the bondage of parade 

 routine for the free life of the forest ; and to think that — 



No barbarous drums shall be my wakening rude ; 

 The jungle cock shall crow my sweet reveille. 



For the first five marches (eighty-two miles), my route 

 lay down the open and well-cultivated valley of the 

 Narbada. In the first march I went off the highway to 

 pay a last visit to a remarkable scene of beauty, a few 

 miles to the south of the road. What visitor to Jubbulpur 

 can ever forget the Marble Rocks ! In any country a 

 mighty river pent up into a third of its width, and for 

 a space of two miles or more boiling along deep and 

 sullen between two sheer walls of pure white marble, a 

 hundred feet in height, must form a scene of rare loveli- 

 ness. But in a bustling, dusty, Oriental land, the charm 

 of coolness and quiet belonging to these pure cold rocks, 

 and deep and blue and yet peUucid waters, is almost 

 entrancing. The eye never wearies of the infinite variety 

 of effect produced by the broken and reflected sunlight, 

 now glancing from a pinnacle of snow-white marble reared 

 against the deep blue of the sky as from a point of silver ; 

 touching here and there with bright lights the prominences 

 of the middle heights ; and again losing itself in the soft 

 bluish grays of their recesses. Still lower down, the bases 

 of the cliffs are almost lost in a hazy shadow, so that it 

 is hard to tell at what point the rocks have melted into 

 the water, from whose depths the same lights in reverse 

 order are reflected as clear as above, but broken into a 

 thousand quivering fragments in the swirl of the pool. 



Here and there the white saccharine limestone is seamed 

 by veins of dark green or black volcanic rock ; a contrast 

 which only enhances, like a setting of jet, the purity of 

 the surrounding marble. The visitor to these Marble 

 Rocks is poled up through the gorge in a flat-bottomed 

 punt as far as the "fall of smoke," where the Narbada 



