360

INDIA

are certain tracts in the Central Provinces bordering the
Godavari River, and extending from that river to the neighbourhood
 of the east coast, of which it is difficult to affirm
that they possess any healthy season at all. The more
southern districts of the Central Provinces and much of
Northern Madras is perhaps the most poisonous tract in
all India. Not all the well-known precautions with which
every traveller in the wilds of India is acquainted will
avail against the thorough saturation of his system with
malarial poison if he remains long in these jungles. The
exclusion of night air, the lighting of bonfires to promote
sirculation of dry currents, sleeping inside mosquito curtains
 (which is undoubtedly a protection) and on a bed
raised high above ground, constant recourse to quinine
{most valuable safeguard of all), and care taken to avoid
work in grass or forest reeking wet from dew either too
early or too late—all these combined will not save the
sportsman long, even at that season of the year which in
northern jungle-covered districts is reckoned to be fairly
healthy. It is probable that during the early period of
the south-west rainfall, when the low-lying forest-covered
fats of the Godavari basin are actually under water to a
great extent, the best chance of comparative immunity
from fever might be found, but it is a season which otherwise
 is not adapted either to sport or work. The failure
of the scheme for opening up the Godavari to navigation
from the north of the Central Provinces to the sea was
due as much to the impossibility of maintaining a body of
workmen under efficient European supervision in this
poisonous country as to any inherent engineering difficulties
 presented by the cataracts or rapids. All that
remains of that scheme now may be seen in a halfcompleted
 waterway blasted through the rocky river-bed at
a point some hundred miles above the mouth of the river,
and in the fragments of forgotten and fallen bungalows
in which lived (and died) many of the European staff
engaged in the scheme. But the extension of Indian
railways has long ago discounted the necessity for river
navigation in this part of India.