They are white,
with very minute pink spots, and of a texture so very fine that they
would be taken for indurated clay on a slight inspection. The houses
of the poorest peasants are here built of this beautiful freestone,
which, after two hundred years, looks as if it had been quarried only
yesterday.
About three miles from our tents we crossed over the little river
Ghorapachhar,[20] flowing over a bed of this sandstone. The soil all
the way very light, and the cultivation scanty and bad. Except within
the enclosures of men's houses, scarcely a tree to be anywhere seen
to give shelter and shade to the weary traveller; and we could find
no ground for our camp with a shrub to shelter man or beast. All are
swept away to form gun-carriages for the Gwalior artillery, with a
philosophical disregard to the comforts of the living, the repose of
the dead who planted them with a view to a comfortable berth in the
next world, and to the will of the gods to whom they are dedicated.
There is nothing left upon the land of animal or vegetable life to
enrich it; nothing of stock but what is necessary to draw from the
soil an annual crop, and which looks to one harvest for its entire
return.
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