— GOP
573
sportsman they furnish the best of all possible ambush in which noiselessly and unseen to stalk the wary buck. To the peasant their shifting shapes, brought into position by any stump or scrub which arrests the eddy, or scattered by the first high wind into ruinous simoom, are the memorials of an ever present danger to his patient husbandry. For the physical geographer nature has written in them some pages of her mystic tale of the fashioning of the land by the might of her falling rivers the tale that here in India is told for us each year in every char and
—
island of the
Ganges and Gogra.
In the course of ages the Gumti has worn for itself a deep and permanent bed to which the drainage of the adjacent country finds its way through a maze of ever-deepening ravines that eat each year further and further into the heart of the country. surface drainage seeking
Dr. Butter has well described the action of the way to a deep-lying river bed.
its
" When the first heavy fall of rain begins to abate, the flat country appears dotted with pools of water and intersected with broad shallow streams, which are soon united at the heads of the branching ravines, and are by these channels conducted into the beds of the permanent nalas and rivers. It is observed that the beds of these ravines branch out and extend further and further into the level country every year, the principal undermining and abrasion of the soil taking place at the small cascade formed by the water when quitting the plain for the channel of the ravine, which may be from one to ten feet lower than the plain itself Much of the soil which has been loosened during the preceding hot winds is thus washed into the rivers, which are thus loaded with a greyish yellow mud. " These nascent ravines, when formed in a hard kankar soil, present the most beautiful and accurate miniature of an Alpine region, showing the long central ridge with its lateral branches and sub-branches and their corresponding plains, vales, valleys and ravines, all in due gradation and relief" (Southern Oudh, p. 23.)
Six well-marked nalas
fall
into the
Gumti
at right angles to its course,
at Akohra, Bajhera, Babuapur, Sarari, Upra, and Jamunidn, At the last of these places the Garera slides lazily into the Gumti through some cherished haimts of sport, precious nooks " to dream of, not to tell." The bittern booms from tall flags that clothe dark half-stagnant pools in this strange At times pintail, widgeon, and mallard, blue teal, and all lonely stream.
—
the choicest of the duck tribe love its shadowy reaches more than the -unsheltered breadths of the S^ndi lake. Shy sandgrouse flutter down to its Its cool brink from the thirsty upland slopes under which it winds. marshy banks teem with such bounty of snipe that only a lack of cartHare, quail, and ridges prevents the fowler from securing a fabulous bag. partridge lurk in the waving grass that divides the sandy slope from the marshy river-bank, and as you look up now and then towards the downs above, you spot, not a hundred yards away, some straying buck of the antlered herds of Beniganj.
