12. In the author's time, when municipal conservancy and sanitation were almost unknown in India, the tyranny of the sweepers' guild was chiefly felt as a private inconvenience. It is now one of the principal of the many difficulties, little understood in Europe, which bar the progress of Indian sanitary reform. The sweepers cannot be readily coerced because no Hindoo or Musalmân would do their work to save his life, nor will he pollute himself even by beating the refractory scavenger. A strike of sweepers on the occasion of a great fair, or of a cholera epidemic, is a most dangerous calamity. The vested rights described in the text are so fully recognized in practice that they are frequently the subject of sale or mortgage. 13. The low-caste Hindoos are generally fond of drink, when they can get it, but seldom commit crime under its influence. 14. An elephant driver, by reason of his position on the animal, has opportunities for private conversation with his master. 15. Elephant drivers (_mahouts_) are Muhammadans, who should have no caste, but Indian Musalmâns have become Hinduized, and fallen under the dominion of caste. 16. Darbhanga is in Tirhût, seventy miles NE. of Dinapore. The Kûsî (Kôsî or Koosee) river rises in the mountains of Nepâl, and falls into the Ganges after a course of about 325 miles. Nâthpur, in the Puraniya (Purneah) District, is a mart for the trade with Nepal. 17. The customary attitude of a suppliant. 18. A small river which falls into the Nerbudda on the right-hand side, at Sânkal. Its general course is south-west. 19. November, 1835. 20. Described in the _Gazetteer_ (1870) as 'a large but decaying village in the Jabalpur district, situated at the foot of the Bhânrer hills, twenty-two miles to the north-west of Jabalpur, on the north side of the Hiran, and on the road to Sâgar'. 21. The convenient restriction of the name Vindhya to the hills north, and of Sâtpura to the hills south of the Nerbudda is of modern origin (_Manual of the Geology of India_, 1st ed., Part I, p. iv). The Sâtpura range, thus defined, separates the valley of the Nerbudda from the valleys of the Taptî flowing west, and the Mahânadî flowing east. The Vindhyan sandstones certainly are a formation of immense antiquity, perhaps pre-Silurian. They are azoic, or devoid of fossils; and it is consequently impossible to determine exactly their geological age, or 'horizon' (ibid. p. xxiii). The cappings of basalt, in some cases with laterite superimposed, suggest many difficult problems, which will be briefly discussed in the notes to Chapters 14 and 17. CHAPTER 9 The Great Iconoclast--Troops routed by Hornets--The Rânî of Garhâ-- Hornets' Nests in India.