8. Secrecy of their operations
Again, as regards the secrecy with which murders were perpetrated and all traces of them hidden, Sir W. Sleeman writes:[16] “While I was in civil charge of the District of Narsinghpur, in the valley of the Nerbudda, in the years 1822–1824, no ordinary robbery or theft could be committed without my becoming aware of it, nor was there a robber or thief of the ordinary kind in the District with whose character I had not become acquainted in the discharge of my duties as magistrate; and if any man had then told me that a gang of assassins by profession resided in the village of Kandeli,[17] not four hundred yards from my court, and that the extensive groves of the village of Mundesur, only one stage from me on the road to Saugor and Bhopāl, were one of the greatest beles or places of murder in all India, and that large gangs from Hindustān and the Deccan used to rendezvous in these groves, remain in them for many days every year, and carry on their dreadful trade along all the lines of road that pass by and branch off from them, with the knowledge and connivance of the two landholders by whose ancestors these groves had been planted, I should have thought him a fool or a madman; and yet nothing could have been more true. The bodies of a hundred travellers lie buried in and around the groves of Mundesur; and a gang of assassins lived in and about the village of Kandeli while I was magistrate of the District, and extended their depredations to the cities of Poona and Hyderābād.”