the women all have baskets or packages upon their heads. The
men never carry anything. On either side of the broad highway
are cultivated gardens and gloomy looking houses and acres covered
with ruins and crumbling tombs. The city of Amber, which, as
I have already told you, was once the capital of the province
and the scene of great splendor, as well as frequent strife,
is now quite deserted. It once had 50,000 inhabitants, but now
every house is vacant. Few of them even have caretakers. The
beautiful palace with its marble coverings, mosaics and luxuriant
gardens is occupied only by a number of priests and fakirs, who
are supposed to spend their time in meditation upon heavenly
things, and in obedience to an ancient custom they sacrifice a
sheep or a goat in one of the temples every morning. Formerly
human beings were slain daily upon this altar--children, young
girls, women and peasants, who either offered themselves for
the sake of securing advancement in reincarnation or were seized
by the savage priests in the absence of volunteers. This was
stopped by the British a century ago, and since then the blood
of rams and goats has atoned for the sins of Jeypore.

XI

ABOUT SNAKES AND TIGERS

A gentleman in Bombay told me that 50,000 people are killed in
India every year by snakes and tigers, and his extraordinary
statement was confirmed by several officials and others to whom I
applied for information. They declared that only about one-half of
the deaths from such causes were ever reported; that the government
was endeavoring to secure more complete and exact returns, and
was offering rewards for the destruction of reptiles and wild
animals. Under instructions from Lord Curzon the authorities
of the central government at Calcutta gave me the returns for
British India for the ten years from 1892 to 1902, showing a
total of 26,461 human beings and 88,019 cattle killed by snakes
and wild animals during the fiscal year 1901-2. This does not
include the mortality from these causes in the eighty-two native
states which have one-third of the area and one fourth of the
population of the empire. Nor does it include thousands of cases
in the more remote portions of the country, which are never reported
to the authorities. In these remote sections, vast areas of
mountains, jungles and swamps, the danger from such causes is
much greater and deaths are more frequent than in the thickly
settled portions; so that my frien