Even if the author's estimate of the numbers be much too
large, the pecuniary result must have been handsome, not to mention
the butter and flour.
20. Hindoo sacred books.
CHAPTER 28
Pestle-and-Mortar Sugar-Mills--Washing away of the Soil.
On the 13th [December, 1885] we came to Barwa Sagar,[1] over a road
winding among small ridges and conical hills, none of them much
elevated or very steep; the whole being a bed of brown syenite,
generally exposed to the surface in a decomposing state, intersected
by veins and beds of quartz rocks, and here and there a narrow and
shallow bed of dark basalt. One of these beds of basalt was converted
into grey syenite by a large granular mixture of white quartz and
feldspar with the black hornblende. From this rock the people form
their sugar-mills, which are made like a pestle and mortar, the
mortar being cut out of the hornblende rock, and the pestle out of
wood.[2]
We saw a great many of these mortars during the march that could not
have been in use for the last half-dozen centuries, but they are
precisely the same as those still used all over India.
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