Close to the village a large wall has been made to unite two small hills, and form a small lake; but the wall is formed of the rounded boulders of the syenitic rock without cement, and does not retain the water. The land which was to have formed the bed of the lake is all in tillage; and I had some conversation with the man who cultivated it. He told me that the wall had been built with the money of _sin_, and not the money of _piety_ (_pâp kê paisâ sê, na pun kê paisâ sê banâ_), that the man who built it must have laid out his money with a _worldly_, and not a _religious_ mind (_nîyat_); that on such occasions men generally assembled Brahmans and other deserving people, and fed and clothed them, and thereby _consecrated_ a great work, and made it acceptable to God, and he had heard from his ancestors that the man who had built this wall had failed to do this; that the construction could never, of course, answer the purpose for which it was intended--and that the builder's name had actually been forgotten, and the work did him no good either in this world or the next. This village, which a year or two ago was large and populous, is now reduced to two wretched huts inhabited by two very miserable families. Bundêlkhand suffers more often and more severely from the want of seasonable showers of rain than any other part of India; while the province of Mâlwa, which adjoins it on the west and south, hardly ever suffers at all.[5] There is a couplet, which, like all other good couplets on rural subjects, is attributed to Sahdêo [Sahadeva], one of the five demigod brothers of the Mahâbhârata, to this effect: 'If you hear not the thunder on such a night, you, father, go to Mâlwa, I to Gujarât;'--that is, there will be no rain, and we must seek subsistence where rains never fail, and the harvests are secure. The province of Mâlwa is well studded with hills and groves of fine trees, which intercept the clouds as they are wafted by the prevailing westerly winds, from the Gulf of Cambay to the valley of the Ganges, and make them drop their contents upon a soil of great natural powers, formed chiefly from the detritus of the decomposing basaltic rocks, which cap and intersect these hills.[6]