THE INDIAN PENINSULA 131

the provinces of Madras and Bombay, the Central Provinces,
 and some of the chief native states of India. It is
separated by no sharply defined line from the north, the
plains of the northern states gradually rising in broken
and irregular steps to the crest of the Vindhya and Satpura
Mountains, and maintaining an average of 1500 feet south
of the Narbada across the central tableland to Mysore,
where it attains to 3000 feet or more. These central
highlands, which include vast primeval forests covering
 rugged hill tracts intersected by wide valleys with
gentle slopes, is depressed towards the east, and is
bounded on either side by well-defined ridges of higher
altitude, which appear as ranges when viewed from the
sea, and follow approximately the line of coast curvature,
leaving a broad strip of level coast between their lower
spurs and the sea. These bounding edges of hill country
are termed the Eastern and the Western Ghats respectively.
The plateau slopes to the east and south-east, so that the
Eastern Ghats are of no great altitude, being about 1000
feet above sea-level, and there is little or no fall from
their crests westward, but the Western Ghats adopt the
formation of a distinct anticlinal with more decision ; and
though irregularly piled together where they first commence
to take shape south of the Narbada, they gradually consolidate
 and finally rise to an altitude of nearly 8000 feet in
the south, where they culminate in the Sispara peaks of the
Nilgiris. The deep blue tone assumed by these magnificent
 grass-covered hills, when the south-west monsoon
sweeps across their crests and breaks on their western
slopes, gives peculiar force to the name—Nilgiris, or
Blue Mountains. South of the Nilgiris the Western
Ghats continue in the formation of a mountain range,
receding, however, from the coast, and -leaving the low
level state of Travancore between themselves and the sea,
until they terminate near Cape Comorin.
The Eastern Ghats commence to round off westward
from a point not far north of Madras, and with broken
dutline fall back from the coast until they merge into the
southern buttresses of the Nilgiris, leaving the broad plains