ruin of the elephant’s feet, and then over undulating
hills of limestone; on the latter I found trees of Cochlos-
permum, whose curious thick branches spread out
somewhat awkwardly, each tipped with a cluster of
golden yellow flowers, as large as the palm of the hand,
and very beautiful: it is a tropical Gum-Cistus in the
appearance and texture of the petals, and their frail
nature. The bark abounds in a transparent gum, of
which the white ants seem fond, for they had killed
many trees. Of the leaves a curious sort of rude
bellows are made, with which the natives of these hills
smelt iron. Scorpions appeared very common here, of
a small kind, inch long; several were captured, and
one of our party was stung on the finger; the smart
was burning for an hour or two, and then ceased.
At Kota we were nearly opposite the cliffs at Bee-
jaghur, where coal is reported to exist; and here we
again crossed the Soane, and for the last time. The
ford was three miles up the river, and we marched to
it through deep sand. The bed of the river is here
500 feet above the sea, and about three-quarters of a
mile broad, the rapid stream being 50 or 60 yards
wide, and breast deep. The sand is firm and
siliceous, with no mica; nodules of coal are said to be
washed down thus far from the coal-beds of Burdee, a
good deal higher up, but we saw none.
The cliffs come close to the river on the opposite
side, their bases clothed with woods which teemed with
birds. The soil is richer, and many individual trees
were very fine; one tree of the Hard/wickia, about 120
feet high, was as handsome a monarch of the forest as
I ever saw, and it is not often that one sees trees in the
tropics, which for a combination of beauty in outline,
harmony of colour, and arrangement of branches and
foliage, would form so striking an addition to an
English park.
There is a large break in the Kymore hills here,
beyond the village of Kunch, through which our route
lay to Beejaghur, and the Ganges at Mirzapore; the
cliffs leaving the river, and trending to the north in a
continuous escarpment flanked with low ranges of
rounded hills, and terminating in an abrupt spur
(Mungeesa Peak) whose summit was covered with a
ragged forest. At Kunch we saw four alligators sleeping
in the river, looking at a distance like logs of wood:
all were of the short-nosed or mugger kind, dreaded by
man and beast; I saw none of the sharp-snouted (or
gavial), so common on the Ganges, where .their long
bills, with a garniture of teeth and prominent eyes
peeping out of the water, remind one of geological
lectures and visions of Ichthyosauri. Tortoises were
frequent in the river, basking on the rocks, and
popping into the water when approached.
On the 1st of March we left the Soane, and struck
inland over a rough hilly country, covered with forest,
fully 1000 feet below the top of the Kymore table-land,
which here recedes from the river and surrounds an
undulating plain, some ten miles either way, facing the
south. The roads, or rather pathways, were very bad,
and quite impassable for the carts, without much engineering,
cutting through forest, smoothing down the
banks of the water-courses to be crossed, and clearing