—
BHtr
296
great pools of stagnant -water and their banks lined with reeds look lifeless the single trees, mostly wild fig and catechu, that are scattered about in great numbers, but which never stand together in groves, give a monotonous sameness to the scene, which is added to by the want of variety in the crops for miles upon miles nothing meets the eye but plains of yellow rice in the autumn and plains of yellow barley in the
The
inert
and
spring ; in place of forests of many-colored trees, a wide prairie of tall grass and underwood, or a barren expanse of dreary white sand, skirts the The sides of the great rivers, except here and there where they horizon. flow between high banks or with a high bank on one side, are singularly ugly and uninteresting. There is hardly a sign of life to be seen , and nothing meets the eye but the wide grass prairie or the barren sandy
beach. greater contrast than is presented, say by two a mile of each other, similar in many respects, each with 2,000 acres and 1,000 inhabitants, but one situated in the upper country, the other in the ganjar. With the aspect of the former every North Indian official is familiar: the village of substantial mud houses nestling close under the mango grove, the masonry well under the old tamarind or banian, the temple newly painted and repaired by the village bankers, and peeping forth from under the trees over the blue jhil. Beyond this the cultivated plain with its endless variety of crops the graceful sugarcane, the awkward giant millet, the diminutive gram and peas, and in the comer of the plain a small hamlet, a young imitation of the parent village.
One cgnnot imagine a
villages within
The ganjar village is utterly different. The inhabitants, instead of being gathered together in one collection of houses, would be scattered in ten different hamlets, each consisting of some twenty huts built of reeds, with a well made of the trunk of a tree let down into the ground, and in place of the alternation of groves and fields ajad water, there extends the flat plain of rice dotted with stunted trees and ending in the dreary sands or the dismal prairie. Adding the twenty-five grants the area lows
of the pargana is as fol-
