The NorthWestern Provinces of India Author:William Crooke Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: birds, here they follow man, and are found only in the neighbourhood of water, round the scattered patches of cultivation or in a few of the moister ravines or v... more »alleys. Here the oak, pine and deodar of the north are replaced by a scanty jungle of gnarled and stunted trees, the bastard Sal, the catechu acacia and the cotton tree. The bamboo abounds, but seldom attains much luxuriance of growth; it is only in favoured spots that the more valuable Sal and teak are to be found. But it is where water combines with woodland, hill and ravine that the scenery really becomes lovely. Such is the valley of the Son, which drains the central plateau into the Ganges. Towards the Ganges the Vindhyan range slopes down to the valley in successive terraces or gradual declivities. We are led up to the first complete view of the rich Plain below by occasional glimpses of the greenery of grove and field scattered here and there along the descent, with the grey sands and silvery waters of the great river on the northern horizon. But where the plateau meets the Son the more stable sandstones form a sheer precipice a couple of hundred feet high, an almost perpendicular wall of rock, from which, as from the battlement of a great fortress, you look down on sheets of virgin forest, and beyond this on the yellow sands which fringe the river. Hence the old Sanskrit poets gave it the name of Hiranya-vaha, "the gold bearer," and the modern Hindu calls it Sona, " the golden." In earlier times considerable quantities of gold seem to have been found in Chota Nagpur, and recent discoveries make it possible that gold mining may be largely revived in this part of the country. As it is at present, the only mining industry is a little iron manufacture carried on by the Agariyas, a tribe of Dravidian smelters who car...« less