was a swift broad stream called the Dhaus.
The river is very capricious, seldom flowing for any length of time in
one channel. This is owing in great measure to the amount of silt it
carries with it from the hills, in its impetuous progress to the
plains.

In these dry watercourses, among the sand ridges, beside the humid
marshy hollows, and among the thick strips of grass jungle, tigers are
always to be found. They are much less numerous now however than
formerly. As a rule, there is no shelter in these water-worn,
flood-ravaged tracts and sultry jungles. Occasionally a few straggling
plantain trees, a clump of sickly-looking bamboos, a cluster of tall
shadowless palms, marks the site of a deserted village. All else is
waving grass, withered and dry. The villages, inhabited mostly by a
few cowherds, boatmen, and rice-farmers are scattered at wide
intervals. In the shooting season, and when the hot winds are blowing,
the only shadow on the plain is that cast by the dense volumes of
lurid smoke, rising in blinding clouds from the jungle fires.

According to the season, animal life fluctuates strangely. During the
rains, when the river is in full flood, and much of the country
submerged, most of the animals migrate to the North, buffaloes and
wild pig alone keeping possession, of the higher ridges in the
neighbourhood of their usual haunts.

The contrasts presented on these plains at different seasons of the
year are most remarkable. In March and April they are parched up,
brown, and dead; great black patches showing the track of a destroying
fire, the fine brown ash from the burnt grass penetrating the eyes and
nostrils, and sweeping along in eddying and blinding clouds. They then
look the very picture of an untenable waste, a sea of desolation,
whose limits blend in the extreme distance with the shimmering coppery
horizon. In the rainy season these arid-looking wastes are covered
with tall-plumed, reed-like, waving grass, varying from two to ten
feet in height, stretching in an unbroken sweep as far as the eye can
reach, except where an abrupt line shews that the swift river has its
treacherous course. After the rains, progress through the jungle is
dangerous. Quicksands and beds of tenacious mud impede one at every
step. The rich vegetation springs up green and vigorous, with a
rapidity only to be seen in the Tropics. But what a glorious hunting
ground! What a preserve for Nimrod! Deer forest, or heathered moor,
c