The jungle is
studded with large peepul-trees, which are all shorn of their small
branches and leaves. The landholders and cultivators told me that
they were taken off by the cowherds who grazed their buffaloes,
bullocks, and cows in these jungles; that they formed their chief
and, in the cold season, their best food, as the leaves of the
peepul-tree were supposed to give warmth to the stomach, and to
increase the quantity of the milk; that the cowherds were required to
pay nothing for the privilege of grazing their cattle in these
jungles, by the person to whom the lands belonged, because they
enriched the soil with their manure, and all held small portions of
land under tillage, for which they paid rent; that they had the free
use of the peepul-trees in the jungles, but were not permitted to
touch those on the cultivated lands and in villages.
White ants are so numerous in the argillaceous muteear soil, in which
their food abounds, that it is really dangerous to travel on an
elephant, or _swiftly_ on horseback, over a new road cut or enlarged
through any portion of it that has remained long untilled. The two
fore legs of my elephant went down yesterday morning into a deep pit
made by them, but concealed by the new road, which has been made over
it for the occasion of my visit near Shahabad, and it was with some
difficulty that he extricated them. We have had several accidents of
the same kind since we came out.
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