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No one who travels through the length and breadth of the continent of India can fail to be struck with the extraordinary variety of its physical aspects. In the north rise magnificent mountain altitudes, bound by snowfield and glacier in eternal solitude. At their feet lie smooth wide spaces of depressed river basins; either sandy, dry, and sun-scorched, or cultivated and water-logged under a steamy moisture-laden atmosphere. To the south spreads a great central plateau, where indigenous forest still hides the scattered clans of aboriginal tribes; flanked on the west by the broken crags and castellated outlines of the ridges overlooking the Indian Ocean, and on the south by gentle, smooth, rounded slopes of green upland. Something at least of the throes and convulsions of nature which accompanied the birth of this changeful land is recorded in the physical aspect of the mountains and valleys which traverse it; and an appeal to the evidence of the rocks is answered by the story of its evolution.

Oldest of all the physical features which intersect the continent is the range of mountains known as the Arāvallis, which strikes across, the Peninsula from north-east to south-west, overlooking the sandy wastes of Rājputāna. The Arāvallis are but the depressed and degraded relics of a far more prominent mountain system, which stood, in Palaeozoic times, on the edge of the Rājputāna Sea. The disintegrated rocks which once formed part of the Arāvallis are now spread out in wide red-sandstone plains to the east. There Vindhyan and Cuddapah sedimentary deposits cover the ancient core of VOL. I.