of rain in due season. They attract the
clouds, and make them deposit their stores in districts that would
not otherwise be blessed with them; and hot and dry countries denuded
of their trees, and by that means deprived of a great portion of that
moisture to which they had been accustomed, and which they require to
support vegetation, soon become dreary and arid wastes. The lighter
particles, which formed the richest portion of their soil, blow off,
and leave only the heavy arenaceous portion; and hence, perhaps,
those sandy deserts in which are often to be found the signs of a
population once very dense.

In the Mauritius, the rivers were found to be diminishing under the
rapid disappearance of the woods in the interior, when Government had
recourse to the measure of preventing further depredations, and they
soon recovered their size.

The clouds brought up from the southern ocean by the south-east trade
wind are attracted, as they pass over the island, by the forests in
the interior, and made to drop their stores in daily refreshing
showers. In many other parts of the world governments have now become
aware of this mysterious provision of nature; and have adopted
measures to take advantage of it for the benefit of the people; and
the dreadful sufferings to which the people of those of our
districts, which have been the most denuded of their trees, have been
of late years exposed from the want of rain in due season, may,
perhaps, induce our Indian Government to turn its thoughts to the
subject.[13]

The province of Malwa, which is bordered by the Nerbudda on the
south, Gujarat on the west, Rajputana on the north, and Allahabad on
the east, is said never to have been visited by a famine; and this
exemption from so great a calamity must arise chiefly from its being
so well studded with hills and groves. The natives have a couplet,
which, like all good couplets on rural subjects, is attributed to
Sahadeo, one of the five demigod brothers of the Mahabharata, to this
effect: 'If it does not thunder on such a night, you, father, must go
to Malwa, and I to Gujarat', meaning, 'The rains will fail us here,
and we must go to those quarters where they never fail'[14]

Notes:

1. The Archaeological Survey is engaged in unceasing battle with the
pipal seedlings.

2. This proposition is too general.

3. The Hiliya, or Haliya, Pass is near the town of the same name in
the Mirzapur district, thirty-one miles south-west