The Railway Traverses A Region 1,400
Feet Above Konkan, And, In Some Places, While One Rail Is Laid On
The Sharp Edge Of The Rock, The Other Is Supported On Vaults And
Arches.
The Mali Khindi viaduct is 163 feet high.
For two hours
we hastened on between sky and earth, with abysses on both sides
thickly covered with mango trees and bananas. Truly English
engineers are wonderful builders.
The pass of Bhor-Ghat is safely accomplished and we are in Khandala.
Our bungalow here is built on the very edge of a ravine, which
nature herself has carefully concealed under a cover of the most
luxuriant vegetation. Everything is in blossom, and, in this
unfathomed recess, a botanist might find sufficient material to
occupy him for a lifetime. Palms have disappeared; for the
most part they grow only near the sea. Here they are replaced by
bananas, mango trees, pipals (ficus religiosa), fig trees, and
thousands of other trees and shrubs, unknown to such outsiders as
ourselves. The Indian flora is too often slandered and misrepresented
as being full of beautiful, but scentless, flowers. At some seasons
this may be true enough, but, as long as jasmines, the various
balsams, white tuberoses, and golden champa (champaka or frangipani)
are in blossom, this statement is far from being true. The aroma
of champa alone is so powerful as to make one almost giddy. For
size, it is the king of flowering trees, and hundreds of them were
in full bloom, just at this time of year, on Mataran and Khandala.
We sat on the verandah, talking and enjoying the surrounding views,
until well-nigh midnight. Everything slept around us.
Khandala is nothing but a big village, situated on the flat top
of one of the mountains of the Sahiadra range, about 2,200 feet
above the sea level. It is surrounded by isolated peaks, as
strange in shape as any we have seen.
One of them, straight before us, on the opposite side of the abyss,
looked exactly like a long, one-storied building, with a flat
roof and a battlemented parapet. The Hindus assert that, somewhere
about this hillock, there exists a secret entrance, leading into
vast interior halls, in fact to a whole subterranean palace, and
that there still exist people who possess the secret of this abode.
A holy hermit, Yogi, and Magus, who had inhabited these caves for
"many centuries," imparted this secret to Sivaji, the celebrated
leader of the Mahratta armies. Like Tanhauser, in Wagner's opera,
the unconquerable Sivaji spent seven years of his youth in this
mysterious abode, and therein acquired his extraordinary strength
and valour.
Sivaji is a kind of Indian Ilia Moorometz, though his epoch is
much nearer to our times. He was the hero and the king of the
Mahrattas in the seventeenth century, and the founder of their
short-lived empire. It is to him that India owes the weakening,
if not the entire destruction, of the Mussulman yoke.
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