Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/506

442 in India—the land not of sultry plains alone, but also of noble mountains.

The Neilgherry Hills are a range of mountains in Southern India, with a base two hundred miles in circumference, lying between the two ranges known as the Eastern and Western Ghauts. Though separate from both, they form a connecting link between the two, as they approach each other towards the termination of the peninsula. A deep jungle stretches on every side around the base of the mountains, giving a home to all the savage beasts of Indian forests, and rendered almost uninhabitable by a deadly miasm.

From out of this vast wilderness the mountains rise in an irregular square to the height of eight thousand feet. On gaining the summit of the Seegoor Pass, the traveller finds before him an elevated table-land, rather than a mountain-top, broken in every direction by hills, ridges, and valleys, sinking sometimes to an altitude of six thousand feet above the level of the sea, and in the highest peak rising to near nine thousand feet. Raised above all other mountains south of the Himalayas, their summits are seen in every direction clothed in the blue of the surrounding atmosphere; hence