THE MAHADEO HILLS 77 



courses. Looking from tlie portico of the rock-cut caves, 

 it is not difficult for the imagination to travel back to the 

 time when the lower margin of the lake was surrounded 

 by the dwellings of a small, perhaps an exiled and perse- 

 cuted, colony of BMdhists, practising for their subsistence 

 the art, strange in these wilds, of civihsed cultivation of 

 the earth, and to hear again the sound of the evening bell 

 in their little monastery floating away up the placid 

 surface of the winding lake. 



Another very striking ravine, called Jambo-Dwip, lies 

 on the opposite side of the plateau from the Andeh-K6h. 

 About a thousand feet of steep descent, down a track 

 worn by the feet of pilgrims, leads to the entrance of a 

 gorge, whose aspect is singularly adapted to impress the 

 imagination of the pilgrim to these sacred hills. A dense 

 canopy of the wild mango tree, overlaid and interlaced by 

 the tree-like limbs of the giant creeper,^ almost shuts out 

 the sun ; strange shapes of tree ferns and thickets of dank 

 and rotting vegetation cumber the path; a chalybeate 

 stream, covered by a film of metallic scum, reddens the 

 ooze through which it slowly percolates; a gloom like 

 twilight shrouds the bottom of the valley, from out of 

 which rises on either hand a towering crag of deep red 

 colour, from the summit of which stretch the ghostly 

 arms of the white and naked Sterculia urens, a tree that 

 looks as if the megatherium might have cUmbed its un- 

 couth and ghastly branches at the birth of the world. 

 Further on, the gorge narrows to a mere cleft between 

 the high cliffs, wholly destitute of vegetation, and strewn 

 with great boulders. Climbing over these, and wading 

 through the waters of a shallow stream, the pilgrim at 

 length reaches a cavern in the rock, the sides and bottom 

 of which have been, by some peculiar water action, worn 

 into the semblance of gigantic matted locks of hair ; while 

 deep below the floor of the cavern, in the bowels of the 

 rock, is heard the labouring of imprisoned waters shaking 

 the cave. It is small wonder that such a natural marvel 

 as this should be a chosen dwelling-place for the god to 

 whom all these mountains are sacred, and that it forms 



1 Bauhmia scandens. 



