Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/188

174 the palaces and tombs (for these, too, are public buildings) of the Mogul emperors — and in other ways, also, have made it worthy of its natural situation, and a splendid gate of entrance to our Indian empire. But half Europeanized as the capital of Western India is, within ten miles of it, in the island of Salsette, at the little-visited Buddhist caves of Kanhari, the traveller will find not only a long series of ancient richly-sculptured cave-temples and monastic retreats, but also the most savage specimens of animal and vegetable life, in a thick jungle which often seems alive with monkeys, and where, if he only remains over night, he would have a very good chance of attracting the attention of the most ferocious denizen of the Indian forest. Though the locomotive bears him swiftly and smoothly up the inclines of the Thull Ghaut, instead of his having to cross the Sáhyádri range by a bridle-path, or be dragged painfully by tortured bullocks at the rate of half a mile an hour, as was the case only a few years ago; yet he has only to stop at the picturesquely-situated bungalow at Egutpoora, and wander a little way along the edge of the great bounding wall of the Deccan, in order to look down immense precipices of columnar basalt, and see huge rock-snakes sunning themselves upon the bastions of old Marátha forts, and be startled by the booming cry of the Entellus monkey, or by coming on the footprints of a leopard or a tiger. And it may not be amiss, when writing of the Western Ghauts, to point out the remarkable parallelism, which has not before been noted, between these mountains and the Himáliya, for it may serve to make the contour of both ranges easily intelligible. Both are immense bounding walls; the one to the elevated plains of the Deccan, and the other, to the still more elevated table-land of Central Asia. Carrying out this parallel, the Narbada (Nerbudda) will be found to occupy very much the same position as the Indus, the Sutlej as the Tápti, and the Godaveri as the Brahmaputra. All have their rise high up on their respective table-lands; some branches of the Godaveri rise close to the sources of the Narbada, just as the Indus and the Brahmaputra have their origin somewhere about Lake Manasarowar; and yet the former rivers fall into the sea on the opposite sides of the Indian peninsula just as the two latter do. So, in like manner, the Tápti has its origin near that of the Narbada, as the Sutlej rises close to the Indus; and if we can trust the Sind tradition, which represents the upper part of the Arabian Sea as having once been dry land, there may have been a time within the human era when the Tápti flowed into the Narbada, as the Sutlej does into the Indus some way above the sea. There is no mountain group in the highlands of Central India where the three southern rivers rise quite so close together as do the three northern rivers from the lofty and inaccessible Tibetan Kailas, but still there is a great similarity in their relative positions; and it is only when we think of the Sáhyádri and Himáliya as boundary-walls that we can understand their relations to the table-land behind them, and their terrific fall to the low-lying land in front.

But there is no snow on the Sáhyádri mountains, so we must hurry on past Nasik, where there is a holy city scarcely less sacred than Benares in the estimation of the Hindus; so holy is it that the mere mention of the river on which it stands is supposed to procure the forgiveness of sins; and the banks of this river are covered by as picturesque ghauts and temples as those of the Gangetic city. No traveller should omit stopping at Nándgaum, in order to pay a visit to the immense series of carved hills, of rock-temples and sculptured caves, which make Ellora by far the most wonderful and instructive place in India. If we have to diverge from the railway line again into the upper Tápti valley, we shall find that the basins of rich and once cultivated soil are covered by dense jungle of grass and bamboo, full of tiger, bear, bison, sambar, and spotted deer, and inhabited, here and there, by Kurkies and other aboriginal tribes, but having a deadly climate during great part of the year. Approaching Khandwa, on the railway, we see the ancient and famous fort of Asirghar in the distance rising eight hundred and fifty feet above the plain, and twenty-three hundred feet above the sea; and Khandwa itself, which has been built with the stones from an old Jain town, is important now as a place where the whole traffic of Central India to Bombay meets, and as one terminus of a branch line of rail which takes into the great native state of India, and the capital of the famous Holkar. Here we enter into the Narbada valley, and are soon between two notable ranges of mountains, the Sátpúra and the Vindhya. Ten years ago the Central Provinces were described as "for the most part a 