Eight Hands Indicate His
Omnipotence, And His Single Body Serves To Remind Us That He Is One,
Though He Is Everywhere, And Nobody Can Avoid His All-Seeing Eye,
Or His Chastising Hand."
The padre was going to say something when the train stopped; we
had arrived at Narel.
It is hardly twenty-five years since, for the first time, a white
man ascended Mataran, a huge mass of various kinds of trap rock,
for the most part crystalline in form. Though quite near to Bombay,
and only a few miles from Khandala, the summer residence of the
Europeans, the threatening heights of this giant were long considered
inaccessible. On the north, its smooth, almost vertical face rises
2,450 feet over the valley of the river Pen, and, further on,
numberless separate rocks and hillocks, covered with thick vegetation,
and divided by valleys and precipices, rise up to the clouds. In
1854, the railway pierced one of the sides of Mataran, and now has
reached the foot of the last mountain, stopping at Narel, where,
not long ago, there was nothing but a precipice. From Narel to
the upper plateau is but eight miles, which you may travel on a
pony, or in an open or closed palanquin, as you choose.
Considering that we arrived at Narel about six in the evening,
this course was not very tempting. Civilization has done much
with inanimate nature, but, in spite of all its despotism, it has
not yet been able to conquer tigers and snakes.
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