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These are gathered for food by the inhabitants with all the greater diligence in consequence of a tradition which, however, does not seem to be at all supported by facts that the general seeding of the bamboo portends a failure of the regular crops. The liberal forests of the Góndwana furnish still other edibles to their denizens.
These hills of the Góndwana country appear to have been considered by the incoming Aryans for a long time as a sort of uncanny land, whose savage recesses were filled with demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of the Máhábháráta and Rámáyana this evil character is attributed to that portion of India lying south of the Vindhyas.
Thus we pursued our ambulatory meditations through the Góndwana. If we had been sportsmen, we should have found full as varied a field for the bagging of game as for that more spiritual hunt after new ideas and sensations in which we were engaged.
Four white bullocks, with humps and horns running nearly straight back on the prolongation of the forehead line, drew us along in a very stately manner at the rate of something like a mile and a half an hour. We were now in the Góndwana, in some particulars one of the most interesting portions of the country.
Many of the villages, however, have a professional huntsman, who will display the most incredible patience in waiting with his matchlock for the game to appear. Besides these articles of diet, the aborigines of the Góndwana have their mhowa tree, which stands them in much the same multifarious stead as the palm does to its beneficiaries.
It appears, however, that the native demons of the Góndwana had fascinating daughters; for presently we find the rajahs from the north coming down and marrying them; and finally, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the keen urgency of the conquering Mohammedans sends great numbers of Rajpúts down into the Góndwana, and a considerable mixture of the two bloods takes place.
Now we saw that, during the Permian, Gondwana Land was heavily coated with ice, and it seems natural to suppose that the severe cold which the glacial fields would give to the whole southern continent was the great agency in the evolution of the highest type of the animal world. From this southern land the new-born mammals spread northward and eastward with great rapidity.
The forest of Spenser's Fairy Queen, in which wandering knights meet with manifold beasts and maleficent giants, and do valorous battles against them in the rescue of damsels and the like such seem to have been the Góndwana woods to the ancient Hindu imagination.
The Afghan seems to have lost no time in improving the foothold thus gained, and he thus founded the modern district of Bhopal, which was formerly divided between Malwa and Gondwana, one gate of the town standing in the former and one in the latter country. Dost Mohammed Khan appears, indeed, to have been not the only adventurer who bettered his fortunes in Bhopal.
The truth is, although I had been for some days wavering upon the brink of these conclusions in a quiet way, I found the old keen ardor of the sportsman still burning too strongly, and I had started out with a breech-loader, intent upon doing much of the Góndwana route gun in hand.
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