Only be careful who your monsoon “chum” is!
[157] The most stringent measures have been found necessary to prevent gentlemen from committing suicide by means of elephant shooting in the pestilential jungles below the hills. Besides, there is some little duty to be done by the Madrassees on the Neilgherries: a convalescent list is daily forwarded to the Commanding officer, reporting those who are equal to such labours as committees and courts of inquest.
[158] Large fans, suspended from the ceiling.
[159] As the Madrassees are familiarly called. The cunning in language derive the term from mulligatawny soup, the quantity of which imbibed in South India strikes the stranger with a painful sense of novelty.
[160] See [Chapter XIX.]
[161] The region of eternal punishment.
[162] “The ethics of India;” the Cornelius Nepos of Hindostani.
[163] No inscriptions have as yet been discovered. The only coin we have heard of was a Roman aureus, whereas in the cairns that stud the plains, medals, of the Lower Empire especially, are commonly met with.
[164] Consecrated stones.
[165] The kistvaens, or closed cromlechs of the Neilgherries, are tumuli about five feet high. The internal chamber is composed of four walls, each consisting of an entire stone seven feet long and five broad, floored and roofed with similar slabs. In the monolithe, constituting the eastern wall, is a circular aperture large enough to admit the body of a child.