Central India, where their fires were seen every night burning upon
the peaks of the highest ranges, were supposed to have had some share
in exasperating the Deity; and the services of the most holy Brahmans
were put in requisition to exorcise the peaks from which the
engineers had taken their angles, the moment their instruments were
removed. In many places, to the great annoyance and consternation of
the engineers, the landmarks which they had left to enable them to
correct their work as they advanced, were found to have been removed
during their short intervals of absence, and they were obliged to do
their work over again. The priests encouraged the disposition on the
part of the peasantry to believe that men who required to do their
work by the aid of fires lighted in the dead of the night upon _high
places_, and work which no one but themselves seemed able to
comprehend, must hold communion with supernatural beings, a communion
which they thought might be displeasing to the Deity.

At last, in the year 1833, a very holy Brahman, who lived in his
cloister near the iron suspension bridge over the Bias river, ten
miles from Sagar, sat down with a determination to _wrestle with the
Deity_ till he should be compelled to reveal to him the real cause of
all these calamities of season under which the people were
groaning.[l3] After three days and nights of fasting and prayer, he
saw a vision which stood before him in a white mantle, and told him
that all these calamities arose from the slaughter of cows; and that
under former Governments this practice had been strictly prohibited,
and the returns of the harvest had, in consequence, been always
abundant, and subsistence cheap, in spite of invasion from without,
insurrection within, and a good deal of misrule and oppression on the
part of the local government. The holy man was enjoined by the vision
to make this revelation known to the constituted authorities, and to
persuade the people generally throughout the district to join in the
petition for the prohibition of _beef-eating_ throughout our Nerbudda
territories. He got a good many of the most respectable of the
landholders around him, and explained the wishes of the vision of the
preceding night. A petition was soon drawn up and signed by many
hundreds of the most respectable people in the district, and
presented to the Governor-General's representative in these parts,
Mr. F. C. Smith. Others were presented to the civi