76 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA 



A few dark indigo-coloured specks at the bottom repre- 

 sent wild mango trees of sixty or eighty feet in height. A 

 faint somid of rmming water rises on the sough of the wind 

 from the abyss. Th-e only sign of life is an occasional 

 flight of blue pigeons swinging out from the face of either 

 cliff, and circling round on suspended pinion, again to 

 disappear under the crags. If a gun is fired, the echoes 

 roll round the hollow in continually increasing confusion, 

 till the accumulated volume seems to bellow forth at the 

 mouth of the ravine into the plain below. If tradition be 

 believed, no mortal foot has ever trodden the dark interior 

 of the Andeh-K6h. I myself never found an entrance to 

 it, though, with the aid of ropes, I got once at the easiest 

 place within a few hundred feet of the bottom. I may say, 

 however, for the benefit of adventurous explorers, that a 

 way in may probably be found by going round behind the 

 Mahadeo peak, and following down the bed of the stream 

 which issues from the cave of the shrine I am about to 

 describe, and which, I think, eventually falls into the 

 Koh under the scarp of Chauradeo. 



Legend has made the Andeh-K6h the retreat of a 

 monstrous serpent, which formerly inhabited a lake on 

 the plateau, and vexed the worshippers of Mahadeo tiU 

 the god dried up the serpent's lake, and imprisoned the 

 snake himself in this rift, formed by a stroke of his trident 

 in the solid rock. It needs no very ingenious interpreter 

 of legend to see in this wild story an allusion to the former 

 settlements of Buddhists (referred to as snakes in Brah- 

 minical writings) on the Puchmurree hill, and their ex- 

 tinction on the revival of Brahmanism in the sixth or 

 seventh century. Certain it is that there once was a 

 considerable lake in the centre of the plateau, formed by 

 a dam thrown across a narrow gorge, and that on its banks 

 are still found numbers of the large flat bricks used in 

 ancient builditigs, while in the overhanging rocks are cut 

 five caves (whence the name of Puchmurree), of the 

 character usually attributed to the Buddhists. Beneath 

 the lower end of the lake lies a considerable stretch of 

 almost level land, on which are still traceable the signs 

 of ancient tillage, in the form of embankments and water- 



