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A few months later her romance came to a tragic end, when her Lothario husband fell under the spell of a brother-officer's wife and ran away with her to the seclusion of the Neilgherry Hills, leaving his wife stranded and desolate.
Fancy, then, such a one as here described; a crescent of low hills craggy, steep, and thickly wooded around you, on three sides, and above them, again, at twenty miles' distance, the clear blue outline of the Neilgherry hills; in your front, the silver sand bed of the dry watercourse divides the thick and somber jungle with a stream of light, till you lose it in the deep shadows at the foot of the hills all quiet, all still, all bathed in the light of the moon, yourself the only man for miles to come, a solitary watcher your only companion the poor cow, who, full of fears, and suspicious at every leaf-fall, reminds you that a terrible struggle is about to take place within a few feet of your bed, and that there will be noise and confusion, when you must be cool and collected.
If he had, every man would make some excuse, desert his duty in the hot months, and go to the Neilgherry hills. Read the first volume of Gamba's 'Travels in South Russia. He was Consul of France, but writes like a Russian. He talks of restoring the commercial communication with Asia by the Phasis, Caspian, and Oxus. All this is absurd.
Lord William Bentinck, who was then Governor-General, was detained by ill-health at Ootacamund in the Neilgherry Hills; a place which, by name at least, is now as familiar to Englishmen as Malvern; but which in 1834 was known to Macaulay, by vague report, as situated somewhere "in the mountains of Malabar, beyond Mysore."
When he understood Lord Chandos did not take the Mint, he went to the Duke and offered to remain, thinking his going out, with Lord Chandos's declining to come in, might, taken together, embarrass the Government. However, the arrangement was already made. Read Lushington's minute on the Neilgherry hills. He wants to make an English colony there.
But perhaps no country in the world has been so prolific of human gods as India; nowhere has the divine grace been poured out in a more liberal measure on all classes of society from kings down to milkmen. Thus amongst the Todas, a pastoral people of the Neilgherry Hills of Southern India, the dairy is a sanctuary, and the milkman who attends to it has been described as a god.
The Huzuls of the Carpathians imagine that they can transfer freckles to the first swallow they see in spring by washing their face in flowing water and saying, "Swallow, swallow, take my freckles, and give me rosy cheeks." Among the Badagas of the Neilgherry Hills in Southern India, when a death has taken place, the sins of the deceased are laid upon a buffalo calf.
Thus it happens that at present the population of India consists of at least thirty distinct nationalities, and that the aboriginal possessors of the Vale of Cashmere have been driven forward, until now they are found only upon the summits of the Neilgherry Mountains, in the extreme southern part of the peninsula. The Brahminical religion has prevailed in India from the earliest period.
After this ceremony every one is free to get in his rice. Amongst the Burghers or Badagas, a tribe of the Neilgherry Hills in Southern India, the first handful of seed is sown and the first sheaf reaped by a Curumbar, a man of a different tribe, the members of which the Burghers regard as sorcerers.
Captain Congreve, after describing the cairns with their rows of stones ranged in circles, the kistvaens or dolmens, the huge rocks placed erect as at Stonehenge, the barrows hollowed out of the cliffs, declares with undisguised astonishment that there is not a Druidical monument of which he had not seen the counterpart in the Neilgherry Mountains.
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