Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/652

 — GOP

574

Striking inland from the Gumti a few miles take you up out of tlie region of uneven sand, scanty irrigation, and rents in kind, into a central plain of good soil, mostly dumat, studded with jhils and tanks, much The jungle, plenty of cheaply dug wells, and fair money rents. further you go from the Gumti the better is the land met with, till in the west you again come on uneven sandy soil, and find yourself on the edge of another river, the Sai. But the land (bhur) on this side is much less sandy than on the Gumti ; the Sai flows so much nearer the level of the surrounding country that much watering can be done from it, and the scour of surface drainage is much less rapid and disastrous than on the eastern side. Round Tandiaon in the heart of the pargana spreads all that is left of the great Bangar jungle, the largest in Oudh at annexation except the jungle of Gokarannath. It was then twelve miles long and six broad. (Sleeman, II. para. 284.) Much of it has disappeared, but much still remains and enables the traveller to call up some faint picture of one side of the wild life of the Bangar five and twenty years ago. Let me quote Dr. Butter as to the great value of these jungles for pasture and in keeping the soil moist and the air cool. In 1838 he wrote almost prophetically

" With the introduction, which cannot now be far distant, of a more equitable but more strictly enforced revenue system, these remnants of the sylvan vesture which adorned the country, which warded off by its shade and immense transpiration the fierce rays of the sun, and which thereby, as well as through the direct deposition of dew dropping from its leaves, maintained an almost perpetual verdure on the ground, and gave origin to frequent springs of running water, may be expected gradually to disappear, thus completing the slow but certain process by which India, liKe all other semi-tropical countries (such as Central Spain Southern Italy, and the western territory of the United States), has its green plains, no longer capable of entangling and detaining water in the meshes of an herbaceous covering, ploughed into barren ravines by its sudden and violent though now short-lived rains, its mean temperature augmented, its springs and perennial streamlets dried up, the distance of water from the earth's surface increased, and its rainfall, and the volume of its rivers diminished." ( Southern Oudh, p. 9.) " Within the last fifty, and still more within the last twenty years, these jungles have been greatly reduced by the demand for firewood, and the country generally has been dried up ; from which causes the horned cattle, both oxen and buffaloes, have greatly diminished in numbers. In the south-west districts towards Manikpur, where the population has increased tenfold within the last fifty years, people who would formerly have possessed 100 oxen and 50 buffaloes have now only four or five of both. Ghi, which was formerly sold at 20 sers the rupee, is now sold at a ser and a half.'* .

{Ibid, p. 64).

The pargana is not well opened out. The Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway skirts itswestemborder for about twenty miles. The Gumti provides water-way along the whole of the eastern side and along the south rims the new road from Sitapur to the Ganges at Mehndi Gh^t vid Misri'kh,