large, the pecuniary result must have been handsome, not to mention
the butter and flour.

20. Hindoo sacred books.

CHAPTER 28

Pestle-and-Mortar Sugar-Mills--Washing away of the Soil.

On the 13th [December, 1885] we came to Barwa Sagar,[1] over a road
winding among small ridges and conical hills, none of them much
elevated or very steep; the whole being a bed of brown syenite,
generally exposed to the surface in a decomposing state, intersected
by veins and beds of quartz rocks, and here and there a narrow and
shallow bed of dark basalt. One of these beds of basalt was converted
into grey syenite by a large granular mixture of white quartz and
feldspar with the black hornblende. From this rock the people form
their sugar-mills, which are made like a pestle and mortar, the
mortar being cut out of the hornblende rock, and the pestle out of
wood.[2]

We saw a great many of these mortars during the march that could not
have been in use for the last half-dozen centuries, but they are
precisely the same as those still used all over India. The driver
sits upon the end of the horizontal beam to which the bullocks are
yoked; and in cold mornings it is very common to see him with a pair
of good hot embers at his buttocks, resting upon a little projection
made behind him to the beam for the purpose of sustaining it [_sic_].
I am disposed to think that the most productive parts of the surface
of Bundelkhand, like that of some of the districts of the Nerbudda
territories which repose upon the back of the sandstone of the
Vindhya chain, is [_sic_] fast flowing off to the sea through the
great rivers, which seem by degrees to extend the channels of their
tributary streams into every man's field, to drain away its substance
by degrees, for the benefit of those who may in some future age
occupy the islands of their delta. I have often seen a valuable
estate reduced in value to almost nothing in a few years by some new
_antennae_, if I may so call them, thrown out from the tributary
streams of great rivers into their richest and deepest soils.
Declivities are formed, the soil gets nothing from the cultivator but
the mechanical aid of the plough, and the more its surface is
ploughed and cross-ploughed, the more of its substance is washed away
towards the Bay of Bengal in the Ganges, or the Gulf of Cambay in the
Nerbudda. In the districts of the Nerbudda, we often see these black
hornblende mortars, in which sugar-canes