Apropos of Jubbulpoor, it is well enough to remark that by the rules of Indian orthography which are now to be considered authentic, the letter "a" without an accent has a sound equivalent to short "u," and a vowel with an acute accent has what is usually called its long sound in English. Accordingly, the word written "Jabalpúr" should be pronounced as if retaining the "u" and the "oo" with which it was formerly written, "Jubbulpoor". The termination púr, so common in the designation of Indian places, is equivalent to that of ville in English, and means the same. The other common termination, abad, means "dwelling" or "residence": e.g., Ahmedabad, the residence of Ahmed. Jabalpúr is but about a mile from the right bank of the Nerbadá (Nerbudda) River; and as I wished to see the famous Marble Rocks of that stream, which are found a short distance from Jabalpúr, my companion and I here left the railway, intending to see a little of the valley of the Nerbadá, and then to strike across the Vindhyas, along the valley of the Tonsa, to Bhopal, making our journey by such slow, irregular and easy stages as should be compatible with that serene and philosophic disposition into which the Hindu's beautiful gravity had by this time quite converted my American tendencies toward rushing through life at the killing pace.
It was a little past midday when we made our first journey along the river between the Marble Rocks. Although the weather was as nearly perfect as weather could be, the mornings being deliciously cool and bracing and the nights cold enough to produce often a thin layer of ice over a pan of water left exposed till daybreak, yet the midday sun was warm enough, especially after a walk, to make one long for leaves and shade and the like. It would be difficult, therefore, to convey the sensations with which we reclined at our ease in a flat-bottomed punt while an attendant poled us up toward the "Fall of Smoke," where the Nerbadá leaps out eagerly toward the low lands he is to fertilize, like a young poet anxious to begin his work of grace in the world. On each side of us rose walls of marble a hundred feet in height, whose pure white was here and there striped with dark green or black: all the colors which met the eye—the marmoreal whites, the bluish grays of the recesses among the ledges, the green and black seams, the limpid blue of the stream—were grateful, calm-toned, refreshing; we inhaled the coolness as if it had been a mild aroma out of a distant flower. This pleasant fragrance, which seemed to come up out of all things, was presently intensified by a sort of spiritual counterpart—a gentle breath that blew upon us from the mysterious regions of death; for on a ghát we saw a small company of Hindus just launching the body of a pious relative into the waters of Mother Nerbadá in all that freedom from grief, and even pleasant contemplation, with which this singular people regard the transition from present to future existence. These corpses, however, which are thus committed to the wave, do not always chime so happily in with the reveries of boating-parties on the Nerbadá. The Marble Rocks are often resorted to by pic-nic parties in the moonlit evenings; and one can easily fancy that to have a dusky dead body float against one's boat and sway slowly round alongside in the midst of a gay jest or of a light song of serenade, as is said to have happened not unfrequently here, is not an occurrence likely to heighten the spirits of revelers. Occasionally, also, the black, ugly double snout of the magar (or Nerbadá crocodile) may pop up from the surface, which may here serve as a warning to the young lady who trails her hand in the water—and I have yet to be in a boating-party where the young lady did not trail her hand in the water—that on the Nerbadá it is perhaps as well to resign an absent-minded hand to the young officer who sits by her in the boat lest Magar should snap it off.
Leaving the Nerbadá we now struck off northward toward the Tonsa, intending to pass round by way of Dumoh, Sangor, Bhilsa and Sanchi to Bhopal. We might have pursued a route somewhat more direct by following directly down the valley of the Nerbadá to Hoshangabad, and thence straight across to Bhopal, but my companion preferred the circuitous route indicated, as embracing a greater variety of interesting objects. He had procured for our conveyance a vehicle which was in all respects suitable to the placidity of his temper; and I make bold to confess that, American as I am—born on the railroad, so to speak—I have never enjoyed traveling as I did in this novel carriage. It was what is called a chapaya. It consisted of a body nearly ten feet in length by more than five in breadth, and was canopied by a top supported upon sculptured pillars of wood. The wheels were massive and low. There were no springs; but this deficiency was atoned for by the thick cushionment of the rear portion of the vehicle, which allowed us to lie at full length in luxurious ease as we rolled along. Four white bullocks, with humps and horns running nearly straight back on the prolongation of the forehead line, drew us along in a very stately manner at the rate of something like a mile and a half an hour.
We were now in the Góndwana, in some particulars one of the most interesting portions of the country. Here are the Highlands of Central India; here rise the Nerbadá and the Tapti—which flow to the westward in a generally parallel direction, and empty into the Gulf of Cambaye, the one at Broode and the other at Surat—as well as the Sôn, the Keyn (or Cane) and the Tonsa, which flow northward into the Jumna. The valley of the Keyn and that of the Tonsa here run across the Vindhyas, which are known to the eastward of this as the Kyrmores, and afford communication between Northern and Southern India. It is along the depression of the latter stream that the railway has been built from Jabalpúr to Allahabad.
The eight hundred thousand Gónds of the Góndwana are supposed to be members of the great autochthonal family of ancient India. These hills of the Góndwana country appear to have been considered by the incoming Aryans for a long time as a sort of uncanny land, whose savage recesses were filled with demons and snakes: indeed, in the epics of the Máhábháráta and Rámáyana this evil character is attributed to that portion of India lying south of the Vindhyas. The forest of Spenser's Fairy Queen, in which wandering knights meet with manifold beasts and maleficent giants, and do valorous battles against them in the rescue of damsels and the like—such seem to have been the Góndwana woods to the ancient Hindu imagination. It was not distressed damsels, however, whom they figured as being assisted by the arms of the errant protectors, but religious devotees, who dwelt in the seclusion of the forest, and who were protected from the pranks and machinations of the savage denizens by opportune heroes of the northern race. It appears, however, that the native demons of the Góndwana had fascinating daughters; for presently we find the rajahs from the north coming down and marrying them; and finally, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the keen urgency of the conquering Mohammedans sends great numbers of Rajpúts down into the Góndwana, and a considerable mixture of the two bloods takes place. With this incursion of Hindu peoples come also the Hindu gods and tenets; and Mahadeo, the "great god," whose home had been the Kailas of the Himalayas, now finds himself domesticated in the mountains of Central India. In the Mahadeo mountain is still a shrine of Siva, which is much visited by pilgrims and worshipers.
The Gónd—he who lives back in the hills, far off from the neighborhood of the extensive planting districts, which have attracted many of those living near them to become at least half-civilized laborers in harvest-time—is a primitive being enough.
"Only look," said Bhima Gandharva, "at that hut if you desire to see what is perhaps one of the most primitive houses since ever the banyan tree gave to man (as is fabled) the idea of sheltering himself from the elements artificially." It was simply made of stakes driven into the ground, between which were wattled branches. This structure was thatched with grass, and plastered with mud.
The Gónd, like the American Indian, has his little patch of grain, which he cultivates, however, in a fashion wholly his own. His sole instrument of agriculture seems to be the axe. Selecting a piece of ground which presents a growth of small and easily-cut saplings—and perhaps, by the way, thus destroying in a few hours a whole cargo of teak trees worth more than all the crops of his agricultural lifetime—he hews down the growth, and in the dry season sets fire to the fallen timber. The result is a bed of ashes over a space of two or three acres. His soil is now ready. If the patch thus prepared happens to be level, he simply flings out a few handfuls of grain, coarse rice, kútki (ponicum) or kódon (paspalum), and the thing is done. The rest is in the hands of the god who sends the rains. If the patch be on a declivity, he places the grain at the upper part, where it will be washed down by the rains over the balance of the field. Next year he will burn some more wood—the first burning will have left many charred stumps and trunks, which he supplements with a little wood dragged from other parts of the forest—on the same spot, and so the next year, by which time it will become necessary to begin a new clearing, or dhya. The dhya thus abandoned does not renew the original growth which clothed it, like the pinelands of the Southern United States, which, if allowed to run waste after having been cleared and cultivated, clothe themselves either with oaks or with a wholly different species of pine from the original growth. The waste dhya, which may have perhaps nourished a splendid growth of teak, becomes now only a dense jungle.