330 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA 



over long rapids, where the water, broken into many 

 channels, rushed between narrow banks overhung with 

 bushes, the boatmen steering the canoe with long poles 

 in the most dexterous manner, now warding her bows from 

 a rock on which the stream broke in a sheet of foam, then 

 prostrating themselves at the bottom of the boat to avoid 

 the sweep of the branches, while the canoe shot through 

 some narrow passage, and presently emerging, after a 

 final shave against a sunken rock, into a deep and silent 

 pool, where the splash of huge fish, and the eye-knobs and 

 serrated backs of crocodiles sailing about, showed that 

 we had entered one of the long, silent reaches that break 

 at intervals the torrent of these moxmtain rivers. My 

 companion had got a severe attack of fever, which marred 

 what would otherwise have been a suflQ.ciently joUy trip. 

 After resting awhile at this most secluded of stations (they 

 get their supphes from Calcutta, several hundreds of miles 

 away, on men's heads, and a convoy had just been trampled 

 up by wild elephants before we arrived), we started again 

 for the Garhjat States, where the next month was spent 

 in unremitting toil among their rugged hiUs. Here we 

 were among the Khond aborigines, famous for the Meria 

 sacrifices of human beings to the dread goddess Kali. How 

 they can have been confounded with our Central Indian 

 Gonds I cannot imagine. They are much blacker and more 

 negro-like in their physique, and speak a whoUy different 

 language, a few words only of which approximate, hke 

 Gondi, to the Tamil of the south. Their country is wholly 

 beyond the hmits of the Central Highlands ; and it would 

 be out of place to enter here into a detailed description of 

 the tribe, even did the few weeks I passed among them 

 justify such an undertaking. We returned from this trip 

 with most of our following severely ill of fever, contracted 

 in these close jungles, where water is so scarce and bad at 

 this time of year (April) that we rose, like river gods, from 

 our daily bath hung with the green slime of the fetid pools 

 from which our supplies were drawn. As we marched 

 northward again we entered the valley of the Jonk river, 

 a tributary of the Mahanadi, and here we fell in again with 

 great herds of buffaloes, and halted for a day or two to 



