nd
perfectly separate, stand the Marble Rocks, a most wonderful natural
phenomenon, not very rare, though, in India. On the flattish banks of
the Nerbudda, overgrown with thick bushes, you suddenly perceive a long
row of strangely-shaped white cliffs.

They are there without any apparent reason, as if they were a wart on
the smooth cheek of mother nature. White and pure, they are heaped up
on each other as if after some plan, and look exactly like a huge
paperweight from the writing-table of a Titan. We saw them when we were
half-way from the town. They appeared and disappeared with the sudden
capricious turnings of the river; trembling in the early morning mist
like a distant, deceitful mirage of the desert. Then we lost sight of
them altogether. But just before sunrise they stood out once more before
our charmed eyes, floating above their reflected image in the water. As
if called forth by the wand of a sorcerer, they stood there on the green
bank of the Nerbudda, mirroring their virgin beauty on the calm surface
of the lazy stream, and promising us a cool and welcome shelter.... And
as to the preciousness of every moment of the cool hours before sunrise,
it can be appreciated only by those who have lived and traveled in this
fiery land.

Alas! in spite of all our precautions, and our unusually early start,
our enjoyment of this cool retreat was very short-lived. Our project was
to have prosaic tea amid these poetic surroundings; but as soon as we
landed, the sun leaped above the horizon, and began shooting his fiery
arrows at the boat, and at our unfortunate heads. Persecuting us from
one place to another, he banished us, at last, even from under a huge
rock hanging over the water. There was literally no place where we
could seek salvation. The snow-white marble beauties became golden red,
pouring fire-sparks into the river, heating the sand and blinding our
eyes.

No wonder that legend supposes in them something between the abode and
the incarnation of Kali, the fiercest of all the goddesses of the Hindu
pantheon.

For many Yugas this goddess has been engaged in a desperate contest
with her lawful husband Shiva, who, in his shape of Trikutishvara, a
three-headed lingam, has dishonestly claimed the rocks and the river for
his own--the very rocks and the very river over which Kali presides in
person. And this is why people hear dreadful moaning, coming from under
the ground, every time that the hand of an irrespo