[10] Among the causes of decay in the Roman aqueducts, was the strong concretion formed on the bottom and sides by matter deposited by the water. No such deposit is made by the water of the Croton.
From Fraser's Magazine
A JUNGLE RECOLLECTION.
BY CAPTAIN HARDBARGAIN.
The hot season of 1849 was peculiarly oppressive, and the irksome garrison duty at Cherootabad, in the south of India, had for many months been unusually severe. The colonel of my regiment, the brigadier, and the general, having successively acceded to my application for three weeks' leave, and that welcome fact having been duly notified in orders, it was not long before I found myself on the Coimbatore road, snugly packed guns and all, in a country bullock-cart, lying at full length on a matress, with a thick layer of straw spread under it.
All my preparations had been made beforehand; relays of bullocks were posted for me at convenient intervals, and I arrived at Goodaloor, a distance of a hundred and ten miles, in rather more than forty-eight hours.
Goodaloor is a quiet little village, about eleven miles from Coimbatore;—but don't suppose I was going to spend my precious three weeks there.
After breakfasting at the traveller's bungalow, we started off again. The bungalow is on the right hand side of the road; and when we had proceeded about two hundred yards, the bullock-cart turned into the fields to the left, and got along how it could across country, towards some low rocky hills, which ran parallel, and at about three miles distance from the Coimbatore road.
After about two miles of this work, sometimes over fallow ground, sometimes through fields of growing grain, (taking awful liberties with the loose hedges of cut brambles, which, however, we had the conscience to build up again as we passed them,) sometimes over broken stony ground, and once or twice lumbering heavily through a rocky watercourse, we at last found ourselves on the grassy margin of a pretty little stream. Fifty yards beyond it, under the shade of a fine mango-tree, my little tent was already pitched; in five minutes I lay stretched on my bed, listening with ravished ears to the glorious accounts of my old Shikaree, who had just come in, hot and tired, from the jungle. He had much to tell,—how since he had been out, three days, he had tracked the tiger every morning up and down a certain nullah; how the brindled monster had been seen by different shepherds; and what was still more satisfactory, how he had but yesterday killed a cow near the spot where the hut had been built. It was now midday;—how to spend the long hours till sunset?