We then went up to Mátherán, the most easily got at hill-station, or sanitarium, passing through the villages Byculla, Chinchoogly, Parell, Dadur, Sion, Coorla, Bhandoop, Tannah, and Derwa. Tannah is a big village, an unhealthy-looking place, with two crumbling forts in the river. Long, long ago there were five thousand velvet weavers here. They also used to cure large quantities of bacon. In the thirteenth century four friars went to dispute with the Moslem Kadi, and told him Mohammed was in hell with his father the Devil, on which he executed them with such tortures that his own King banished him, and the Portuguese took signal revenge. Our third halt was Kalyan junction. This poor village port was, in A.D. 200, the far-famed Kalliénapolis, which shipped dry goods and precious woods to the outer west. We are also now on classic ground, near the northern extremity of the Shurpáraka, or winnow-shaped region, the Greek Limyrica, where some have placed Ophir of Solomon. The Konkan lowland is like the Arabian desert, tawny, not with sand, but black patched with fire. Here we turn down towards Madras, joining the Calcutta Railway, and pass Budapoor. We catch the Deccan hot winds, and alight at Narel, a little Maharatta village at the eastern base of Mátherán, which will be noted afterwards as the birthplace of the infamous Nana Sahib. Here we mount ponies. We had to climb up four plateaux, and we arrived at the Alexandra Hotel, Mátherán, a very comfortable bungalow. The wooded lanes, the wild flowers, the pure atmosphere, the light and shadows playing on the big foliage, and the birds rustling and singing in it, were delightful to us. We were standing on a table-land of eight square miles covered with bungalows in lovely woods, seamed with riding-paths--regular leafy screens, whose ends lead to famous points, each one showing a magnificent view. We looked down splendid ravines amongst buttress-shaped mountains, light and shade sharply defined, burnt yellow grass, green trees and black basalt. The fresh vivid verdure of the woods is a repose to the eyes, weary by tawny lowlands and fœtid jungly undergrowth. We enjoy bright green grove, black rock, red-yellow laterite, a luxuriance of fernery, after so much palm and bamboo, aloe and cactus. We have got a patch of virgin forest and plenty of the gigantic anjun, whose pink-and-lilac bloom look like patches of morning sky through the foliage, and you hear everywhere the bark of the Wánúrú monkey, which is something like that of the wolf.