356 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA 



our dependencies, as India herself will assuredly benefit 

 from having the bull's-eye of outside observation turned 

 on to her obscurity. I will here speak only of the glorious 

 field that the country offers to the sportsman— incompar- 

 ably the finest in the world. As a field for sportsmen, 

 Africa may be thought to be better, but it is not so if India 

 be looked at as a whole. Perhaps more animals in number 

 or in size may be slaughtered in Central Africa ; but that 

 does not surely imply superior Sfort. In reading accounts 

 of African shooting, I have often wondered how men could 

 continue to wade through the sickening details of daily 

 massacre of half-tame animals offering themselves to the 

 rifle on its vast open plains. In India fewer animals will 

 perhaps be bagged; all will have to be worked for, and 

 some perhaps fought for. The sport will be far superior, 

 and the sportsman will return from India with a collection 

 of trophies which Africa cannot match. Africa and India 

 both have their elephants. We cannot offer a hippo- 

 potamus ; but we have a rhinoceros superior in a sporting 

 point of view to his African relative. We have a wild 

 buffalo as savage and with far superior horns to the Cape 

 species; and we have four other species of wild bovines 

 besides, to which there is nothing comparable in Africa. 

 In fehnes, besides a lion, a panther, and a hunting-leopard, 

 almost identical with those of Africa, we have the tiger, 

 and one, if not two, other species of leopard. Our black 

 antelope is unsurpassed by any of the many antelopes 

 of Africa; and besides him we have fourteen species of 

 antelopes and wild goats and sheep in our hUls and plains, 

 affording the finest stalking in the world, to compare with 

 the other antelopes of Africa. Africa has no deer properly 

 speaking at all, except the Barbary stag, which is out of 

 the regular beat of sportsmen. India, on the other hand, 

 has nine species of antlered deer. We have three bears; 

 Africa has none at all. There is no country in the world 

 that can show such a list of large game as we can in India. 

 And for minor sport, what can compare with our endless 

 array of pheasants, partridges, and wildfowl ? 



All this, too, is now so easy of access. The traveller 

 may step ashore, in Bombay, with nothing more than a 



