CHAPTER VIII 



THE HIGHER NARBAdI 



JuBBULPtJR is now rather an important place, being 

 the point of junction of the two lines of railway which 

 between them connect the political with the commercial 

 capital of India, Calcutta with Bombay, and over which 

 pass all the passengers, and much of the goods, in transit 

 between England and upper India. At the time of 

 which I write it was a small civil and military station, 

 of which few who had not been there knew anything, 

 except that it was situated somewhere in the wilds of 

 Central India. I remember when we first got our orders 

 to march there from upper India no one could give us 

 a route to it. It was trooped from Madras at that time, 

 and so of course the Bengal authorities could not be 

 expected to know anything about it. We found it the 

 pleasantest of Indian stations ; situated in a green hollow 

 among low rocky granite hills always covered with verdure ; 

 with tidy hard roads and plenty of greensward about 

 them ; with commodious bvingalows embowered in magnifi- 

 cent clumps of bamboo ; remarkable for the dehcacy and 

 abimdance of its fruits and other garden products, including 

 the pineapple, which will not grow anywhere else in 

 Central India ; and withal, from its land-locked condition 

 forbidding exports, a most absurdly cheap sort of place 

 to live in. All this is now changed. The steam-horse 

 has torn his way through the parks, and levelled the 

 bamboo clumps that were the glory of the place. Hideous 

 embankments, and monstrous hotels, and other truly 

 British buildings, stare one in the face at every turn. 

 Crowds of rail-borne " picturesquers " assail the Marble 

 Rocks and other sights about the place. Everything 

 has run up to the famine prices induced by the rapid 



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