1877.] Chandrasekhara Banurji —The Kaimur Range. 17 
merciless tyrant o£ Mathura. Maharaja Kansa attempted to kill this 
child by dashing her against a stone. The girl, who was the manifes¬ 
tation of S'akti, or the creative energy of the Deity, gave the slip, hovered 
over Kansa in the form of a kite, warned him of his future fate at the 
hands of the youth who was being reared at Gokula, and steered her aerial 
flight until she perched on the peak near which her shrine now stands, four 
miles south of Mirzapur. The entire range of the Vindhya Mali is dedicat¬ 
ed to the shrines of Barani, and is itself considered a mass of sacred matter, 
which the hill-men adore as Dliarti or the earth-god. The spirit of 
the great goddess guards the heights of the chain and its ghats, fences 
its steep sides, and protects the hill-men from falls and surprises, from 
wild animals and wilder demons. If the votaries of Vishnu, of Sakya 
and of the Sun had struggled to establish their respective cults on the right 
bank of the Son, the left has been held undisputedly and solely by the wor¬ 
shippers of S'akti. In Gaya we have the shrines of Buddha, Vishnu and Surya- 
narayana predominant in different quarters of the district. On the opposite 
bank we have fanes of the several manifestations of Uma alone. Vindhyesvari, 
Bhavani, Tripura, Mundesvari and Tarachandi are perched on the summits of 
the Kaimur Range. The goddess undoubtedly exercises great sway on these 
heights. Owing to her influence it is thought that demons in the shape of 
painful diseases kill few of the hill-men. Fewer still fall a prey to the 
wild animals. Peace reigns throughout the length and breadth of the 
Chero and Kharwar hamlets. Few crimes are perpetrated, although fewer, 
we suspect, are reported, and one Police head-constable accordingly, with 
two assistants posted on the tableland, has been sufficient for a number of 
years to keep British prestige alive over this extensive range. 
The great peculiarity in the formation of the range is its steepness. 
The flat tablelands on its top are supported by precipitous sides which rise 
suddenly from fields where there is hardly a stone to impede the plough. 
About a third of these heights near the base is generally covered with a 
slope of rubbish which it must have taken ages to wash down. The 
tall crests of many a forest tree crown these slopes. But immediately 
above these, the sides are mere layers of primitive rocks, barren and black 
at places, high rocky walls standing in bold prominence against the blue 
sky. In others the walls bend into glens and recesses where a little dip 
between two summits serves as the channel for whirling cataracts. The 
spots below these cataracts are generally sacred pools which retain water 
throughout the year, and enable many important streams to flow down 
to the plains. “ After* a clear drop of two to six hundred feet, the water 
splashes into a deep tarn scooped out by its continual falling, on leaving 
which it runs through a channel several miles in length, and obstructed 
* Memoirs of the Geological Survey, Vol. VII, p. 20. 
C 
