Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planterElliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
History
Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planter
Elliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
Caste -- India; Coffee; Karnataka (India) -- Description and travel; Karnataka (India) -- Politics and government
Delightful indeed were the brilliant and varied scenes I have been
attempting to describe, and after them the remainder was by comparison
tame, but still I found that, as I took a canoe the following evening and
rowed up the forest-margined pool from which the rapids emerge, that the
minor scenes at the falls have exquisite charms of their own. And then it
was that I realized that, varying though the scale may be, there is
everywhere about the falls the same beauty of detail and beauty of
combined effect, and that, too, unaccompanied by a single jarring note.
For nowhere can you say, as you can often say in viewing scenes elsewhere,
"leave out this, or alter that, and the scene would be perfect," and in
none of the scenes about the falls does anything poor, or base, or mean,
or uninteresting strike the eye, and as I rowed slowly up the pool I felt
that the mind was both charmed and soothed by the exquisite repose of the
scene, which is only broken, if indeed it can be said to be broken, by the
beautiful birds and gaily painted kingfishers which occasionally wing
their way across the water, or flit along the margin of the forest-clad
shore. As you look towards the West the eye wanders over the wild
assemblage of water-worn rocks and boulders which intervene between the
pool and the head of the falls, to rest finally on the distant hills,
covered mostly to their tips with the evergreen forest, while on looking
up the river you see that it is flanked by woods on either hand, and as
you lose sight of the water as it bends towards the south, the eye glances
upwards to hills of moderate height, wooded in the hollows, and showing on
the ridges grassy vistas dotted with occasional trees.
On returning, I went lower down in the pool than the point I had started
at, and passed a number of rocks worn into all sorts of curious shapes,
and one of these leaned, like some gigantic Saurian, over the flood. As we
neared the rapids, one felt that one would by no means like to run any
risk of being drawn into one of them, and I was by no means anxious to go
nearer to them than the boatmen, wished. One of them told me that the
natives sometimes descended the cliffs between the Roarer and the Rocket
Falls in order to carry off the fledglings from the nests of the blue rock
pigeons, and said that several lives had thus been lost. He said that
there was no way of reaching the bottom of the cliff, and rather quaintly
added, "Those who came up again came up, and those who did not, died." He
said that some European had once put what was evidently dynamite into the
pool. A great explosion followed, which killed a large number of fish,
many of which were washed over the falls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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