[Sidenote: Repeat Map No. 27.] The upland which fills most of the centre of India and bears in its midst the Nizam’s Dominions is in most parts of no great fertility. Over large areas it is fitted rather for the pasture of horses and cattle than for the plough. Agriculture is naturally best in the river valleys, but there is one large district lying on the plateau top east of Bombay, and on the hill tops about the Narbada valley east of Baroda, which is of a most singular fertility. The usually granitic and schistose rocks of the plateau have here been overlaid by great sheets of basaltic lava. Detached portions of these lava beds form the table tops of the hills in the country rendered famous by Wellesley’s Maratha campaigns. The lava disintegrates into a tenacious black soil, which does not fall into dust during the dry season, but cracks into great blocks, which remain moist. As the dry season advances these blocks shrink, and the cracks grow broader, so that finally it is dangerous for a horse to gallop over the plain lest its hoof should be caught in one of these openings of the ground. This remarkable earth is known as the Black Cotton Soil. The cotton seeds are sown after the rains, and as the young plant grows a clod of earth forms round its roots, which is separated from the next similar clod by cracks. Wheat is grown on this soil in the same manner, being sown after the rainy season and reaped in the beginning of the hot season, so that from beginning to end the crop is produced without exposure to rain, being drawn up by the brilliant sunshine and fed at the root by the moisture preserved in the heavy soil. Thus in the part of India which lies immediately east, northeast, and north of Bombay the lowlands and the uplands are alike fertile—the lowlands round Ahmadabad and Baroda and in the valleys of the Narbada and Tapti Rivers because of their alluvial soil, and the uplands round Poona and Indore because they are clothed with the volcanic cotton soil. Just within the northwestern corner of the Nizam’s territory are the famous rock temples of Ellora, perhaps the most magnificent of their kind in the world. The sculpture is of Brahman, Buddhist, and Jain dates, the monuments of various religions being thus as it were imposed upon one another.