Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/288

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 * are fast decreasing, and the very race seems threatened with extermination, unless Government take some means to suppress the unnatural custom.
 * XIII
 * are fast decreasing, and the very race seems threatened with extermination, unless Government take some means to suppress the unnatural custom.
 * are fast decreasing, and the very race seems threatened with extermination, unless Government take some means to suppress the unnatural custom.

3. THE LAKE.—The chief feature in the landscape is the lake, a serpentine sheet of water several miles in circumference, formed by throwing a high dam across the principal ravine, around which is the public drive. It is a very extraordinary fact that the authorities of Ootacamund are taking the most active measures to ruin the lake, the greatest ornament of these hills, which preceding authorities have gone to so much labour and expense to construct. A cutting at Kaitee, on a gigantic scale, for a new road to Coonoor is being made across a spur of the elk hill, and to save the expense of cooly hire in removing the earth, a stream of water is brought down from Dodabeth, by which thousands of tons of soil are washed away, a great part of which finds its way into the lake. Indeed, a great part of the head of the lake is already in a state of marsh. This is very much to be regretted, for the lake is being silted up, in order to save a trifle in excavating a road that I feel confident will not remain open two monsoons before it be closed by landslips. It appears to me that the very opposite policy ought to be adopted with reference to this beautiful lake—that the three upper bunds should
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