Page:Provincial geographies of India (Volume 4).djvu/23

I] of the landscape is a high wall of kanazo growing along the courses of small streams crossing the cultivated plains or forming one face of extensive patches of jungle in the less cultivated parts, and in the south reaching often to the mangrove strip on the water's edge. Even in the cultivated and cleared portions odd trees often still remain as reminders of the kanazo jungle which formerly covered the whole. The river bank, built up by silt, is generally the highest land, but the streams sway to this side and to that as they erode their beds, and the bends tend to move along the course according to the ordinary fashion of river-action; the high ridge is therefore missing in places, the middle levels being contiguous to the rivers. Here, if the stream is large, the paddy suffers from the waves continuously beating upon it, and along the main rivers a fringe of jungle has commonly been left to break the force of the waves and screen the cultivation behind. The cultivators' villages are squeezed into small areas of land, which is uncovered at neap tide and sometimes at all ebb tides, and in lucky cases land is found for the village which is hardly inundated at all; generally these sites are along the banks of the smaller streams, the force of waves on the main rivers being an objection to building there. But commonly in the rainy season, and in the case of a large number for the whole year, the cultivators live in isolated huts or in small groups of two or three houses out in the fields. The highest available land is chosen and its level raised by layers of earth, and on that the house is built; and the whole family group of wife and dogs, cattle and children are accommodated in the closest association. The man and his cattle go out to plough; but except for an occasional journey to buy something to vary a diet of fish-paste and rice the wife may not leave for months this small area of thirty or forty feet square in which the children too must build all their houses, wage all their wars and hold all their pwès and processions, romping with the dogs or dyeing the chickens in their leisure hours.

The whole of the Delta is infested with mosquitoes.

The people generally recognize different varieties of mosquito, but in some places the general view is that expressed by an old Karen, who assured [Mr Grantham] there was only one kind in his village, and on further enquiry with a view to identifying that kind explained that it was "the biting kind." In the south