Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/757

733 GEOGRAPHY.] INDIA 733 in summer. The spreading banyan, with its colonnades of hanging roots ; the stately jripal, with its green masses of foliage ; the leafless wild cotton-tree, glowing with heavy crimson flowers ; the tall, feathery tamarind, and the quick-growing babul, rear their heads above the fields. As the rivers approach the coast, the palms begin to take possession of the scene. The ordinary landscape in the delta is a flat stretch of rice-fields, fringed round with evergreen masses of bamboos, cocoa-nuts, date-trees, areca, and other coronetted palms. This densely peopled tract seems at first sight bare of villages, for each hamlet is hidden away amid its own grove of plantains and wealth- giving trees. The bamboo and cocoa-nut play a conspicuous part in the industrial life of the people ; and the number of products derived from them, including rope, oil, food, ani timber, has been dwelt on with admiration by many writers. The crops also change as we sail down the rivers. In the north, the princip.il grains are wheat, barley, Indian corn, and a variety of millets, such as jodr (Holcus Sorghum] and bdjra (Holcus spicatus). In the delta, on the other hand, rice is the staple crop and the universal diet. In a single district, Rangpur, 295 separate kinds of rice are known to the peasant, who has learned to grow his favourite crop in every locality, from the solid field, which yields the dman harvest, to the swamps 12 feet deep, on the surface of whose waters the rice ears may be seen struggling upwards for air. Sugar-cane, oil-seeds, flax, mustard, sesamum, palma-christi, cotton, tobacco, indigo, safllower, turmeric, ginger, coriander, capsicum, cummin, and many precious spices and dyes are grown both in the North-Western or Upper Provinces, and in the moister valleys and delta of Lower Bengal. A whole pharmacopoeia of native medicines, from the well-known aloe and castor- oil to obscure but valuable febrifuges, is derived from shrubs, herbs, and roots. Resins, gums, varnishes, scents, and a hundred articles of commerce or luxury are collected in the fields or forests. Vegetables of many sorts, both indigenous and imported from Europe, form a large part of the food of the people. The melon and huge yellow pumpkin spread themselves over the thatched roofs ; fields of potatoes, yams, and brinjal are attached to the home steads. The tea-plant is reared on the hilly ranges that skirt the plains both in the north-west and in Assam ; the opium poppy about half down the Ganges, around Benares and Patnd ; the silk-worm mulberry still farther down in Lower Bengal ; while the jute fibre is essentially a crop of the delta, and would exhaust any soil not fertilized by river floods. Even the jungles yield the costly lac dye and tasar silk cocoons. The maJmd, also a product of the jungle, produces the fleshy flowers which form a staple article of food among the hill tribes, and when distilled supply a cheap spirit. The sdl, sissu, tun, and many other indigenous trees yield excellent timber. Flowering creepers, of gigantic size and gorgeous colours, festoon the jungle ; while each tank bears its own beautiful crop of the lotus and water-lilies. Nearly every vegetable product that feeds and clothes a people, or enables it to trade with foreign countries, abounds. them We come now to the third division of India, namely the - three-sided table-land which covers the southern half or more strictly peninsular portion of India. This tract, known in ancient times as the Deccan (Dakshin), literally &quot; the right hand or south,&quot; comprises the Central Provinces, Berar, Madras, Bombay, Mysore, and the native territories of the nizam, Sindhia, Holkar, and other feudatory states. It had in 1872 an aggregate population of over 90 millions. For the sake of easy remembrance, therefore, we may take the inhabitants of the river plains in the north to be now nearly 150 millions, and those of the southern three-sided table-land at nearly 100 millions. The Deccan, in its local The acceptation, is restricted to the high tract between the Deccan. Narbadd (Nerbudda) and the Kistnd rivers ; but it is popularly understood to include the whole country south of the Vindhyas as far as Cape Comorin. It slopes up from the southern edge of the Gangetic plains. Three ranges of hills support its northern, its eastern, and its western side ; and the last two meet at a sharp angle near Cape Comorin. The northern side rests on confused ranges, running with a general direction of east to west, and known in the aggregate as the Vindhyd mountains. The Vindhyas, however, are made up of several distinct hill systems. Two sacred peaks guard the flanks in the extreme east and west, with a succession of ranges stretching 800 miles between. At the western extremity, Mount Abu, famous for its exquisite Jain temples, rises, as a solitary outpost of the Aravalli hills, 5650 feet above the Rdjputdna plain, like an island out of the sea. Beyond the southern limits of that plain, the Vindhya range of modern geography runs almost due east from Guzerat, forming the northern wall of the Narbada valley. The Satpura mountains stretch also east and west to the south of that river, and form the watershed between it and the Tapti. Towards the heart of India the eastern extremities of these two converge in the highlands of the Central Provinces and their lofty level plains. Passing still farther east, the hill system finds a continuation in the Kdimur range and its congeners, which eventually end in the outlying peaks and spurs that form the western boundary of Lower Bengal, and abut on the old course of the Ganges under the name of the Rajmahal hills. On the extreme east, Mount Parasnath like Mount Abu on the extreme west, sacred to Jain rites rises to 4400 feet above the level of the Gangetic plains. The various ranges of the Vindhyas, from 1500 to over 4000 feet high, form, as it were, the northern wall and buttresses which support the central table-land. Though now pierced by road and railway, they stood in former times as a barrier of mountain and jungle between northern and southern India, and formed one of the main obstruc tions to welding the whole into an empire. They consist of vast masses of forests, ridges, and peaks, broken by cultivated valleys and broad high-lying plains. The other two sides of the elevated southern triangle are Ghdts. known as the Eastern and Western Ghdts (Ghauts). These start southwards from the eastern and western extremities of the Vindhya system, and run along the eastern and western coasts of India. The Eastern Ghdts stretch in frag mentary spurs and ranges down the Madras Presidency, here and there receding inland and leaving broad level tracts between their base and the coast. The Western Ghdts form the great sea-wall of the Bombay Presidency, with only a narrow strip between them and the shore. In many parts they rise in magnificent precipices and headlands out of the ocean, and truly look like colossal &quot; passes or landing- stairs &quot; (ghats) from the sea. The Eastern Ghdts have an average elevation of 1500 feet. The Western Ghdts ascend more abruptly from the sea to an average height of about 3000 feet, with peaks up to 4700, along the Bombay coast, rising to 7000 and even 8760 in the upheaved angle which they unite to form with the Eastern Ghdts, towards their southern extremity. The inner triangular plateau thus enclosed lies from 1000 to 3000 feet above the level of the sea. dotted with peaks and seamed with ranges exceeding 4000 feet in height. Its best known hills are the Nilgiris (Neilgherries), with the summer capital of Madras, Utakarnand, 7000 feet above the sea. The highest point is Doddbetta Peak (8760 feet), at the upheaved southern angle. The interior plateau is approached by several