Page:Modern Hyderabad (Deccan).djvu/131

Rh I have found in Hyderabad State, in fact, it was so good, I began to fear that I had come by mistake into one of the luxurious places that His Highness's State Railway reserves so jealously for the use of its officers and their friends.

Singareni, as seen from the Rest House, did not resemble any mining centre I had visited in other parts of the world, and apart from a small line along which ran empty trucks, there was nothing to intimate that I was on a coalfield. Men, women and boys, carrying lamps, passed in batches and I was told that they were the "miners;" and, later on, Englishmen drove by in neat buggies, and they were pointed out to me as "the mine Sahibs on their way to office." Wood, my servant said, was expensive in the bazaar, but otherwise prices there were the same as in Secunderabad, and he had found an English Memsahib who sold fruits and vegetables, and from her he had obtained big tomatoes and enormous carrots and turnips. I learnt, later on, that water is only too plentiful in the mines, and, in consequence, everyone in Singareni can have a garden all the year round. Moreover the Company has made a tank, that is developing into a pretty