208 
A NATURALIST ON THE PROWL. 
restrained him, for eyes were on us. We did, however, 
annex two coins, evidently pious offerings, from a shelf 
in the rock, leaving in their place a two-anna piece, that 
we might be able to repel the charge of meanness. When 
we got the verdigris off these coins, we found that they 
did not belong to the time of the Sonda kings, but were 
copper pice of the Honourable East India Company. 
In another part of the rock there was a hole, or cave, 
suitable to be the entrance to a subterranean passage 
leading to some famous Lingayet shrine in the Himalayas. 
These holes always lead somewhere. But the men with 
us were not Lingayets and would not even invent infor- 
mation. However, the patel supplied the want by giving 
us an account of the rise of the shrine. He showed us 
a well in the rock which never gets dry, and the broken 
walls of a temple and fort. These were never completed 
because of the mortality caused by tigers, which carried 
off four or five of the workmen every night till they 
abandoned the work. The instruments of worship are 
now kept in the valley below and brought up for the 
annual festival. 
We believed all the patel told us, and put it down in 
an M.P.’s note-book which we keep. Then we returned 
