bluff overlooking the great plain and from a distance i know not why has the appearance of a ruined temple very glad were a winter pilgrimage we to reach it about three o clock in the afternoon and partake of a lamb whole in the fashion with other luxuries just below this house start the six miles of massive dam that runs across the plain to form the retaining wall of the vast body of water which is to be held up as yet this water is allowed to escape but next winter when the dam is completed it will be saved and let out for purposes of there is nothing new in the world in the course of the building of the dam were discovered the remains of one more ancient also running across the plain but a smaller area indeed its is to be pressed into the service of the present generation i examined it and came to the conclusion that the is of the roman period mr j h of the indian department the very able engineer who has designed these great works and carried them out so successfully is however of opinion that it is probably he is right this at least is clear that people in days long dead could plan and execute such as well as we do to day roman or the stone work is admirably laid and bound together with some of the hardest and best that ever i saw the messrs christian who have contracted to complete this employ about three thousand men and women mostly on a system of piece work in the evening i walked along the great dam and them like there and in the which are to the water they were then engaged in facing the dam with stone which is fitted together but not carrying up great blocks upon their backs and laying them in place under the direction of at first the provision of this facing stone was difficult and expensive as the stuff had to be six or seven � r gate at to miles indeed its cost threatened to swallow up most of the profits then it was that within half a mile of the place where the material was needed veiy luckily mr charles christian in the course of an walk discovered an of excellent stone soft to work but with the property of in water the get it out by a simple but effective system no doubt that which has been followed by their ancestors for thousands of years a skilled man can a great number of suitable blocks in a day apparently with ease when i tried it however i found the task somewhat beyond me from the strong resemblance of the material i believe that this was the very stone used by the of the ancient dam below the doubtless they discovered the as mr christian did although oddly enough the natives who had lived in the neighbourhood all their lives declared that nothing of the sort existed for miles it was the old case of eyes and no eyes i said some pages back that living in c is cheap and of this here i had an instance the house put up by messrs christian for their convenience while directing the works is spacious two and built of stone with if i remember right a kind of mud roof laid upon covered with split cane properly made and attended to such last for years the whole cost of the building which was quite large enough to accommodate with comfort seven or eight people and servants was less than � including the large in england it would cost at the very least a thousand and probably a great deal more chapter xi that night a great gale blew roaring round the house as though we had been in or at instead of southern in the morning the wind had dropped but the sky was heavy with ominous looking rain clouds floating here and there in the blue after breakfast we mounted the that had been provided for us a blessed change from the familiar mule and set out to explore the plain and the dam this magnificent plain which in breadth from ten to twenty miles runs practically the whole length of the body of the island from on the east to on the west that is a distance of about miles once it was a dense forest now it is open level country cultivated here and there but for the most part barren on either side of it north and south stretch the two of mountains that of and that of and it is the rock brought down from these mountains in the winter floods by the river and other torrents that form the soil of the plain what a soil it is i deep brown in colour of an unknown thickness � it has been proved to fifty feet � and i suppose as rich and productive as any in the world hitherto or at any rate since the days two natural accidents however have made it comparatively that of and that of the greater part of this end of the plain which i am now describing for has been a swamp in winter and an arid wilderness in summer it is to remedy this state of that the have been constructed to hold up the waters in winter and pour their life giving streams forth again in summer in the future all this vast area of land or thousands of acres of it that will fall imder their influence ought to produce the most enormous crops on this point i see only one fear upon the top surface of the soil and in places going a foot or two into it are little veins of white deposited i suppose from the floods these may make the surface earth sour and until they are affect the health 