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Show "" ' " GREAT TE.MPIX AT "HADUKiA MADKAS, dusty town of splendid splen-did distances, with a harbor unprotected from storms, is yet the terminus of four railway rail-way lines and the third largest city of India. Its importance is less due to its position as a trading center than to its being the capital of a presidency considerably con-siderably larger than Great Britain and Ireland. It is the seat of a university uni-versity and its observatory keeps the time for the whole of India. Many of the modern public and official offi-cial buildings in Madras are handsome and imposing, but ever since Queen Elizabeth granted a charter to the original East India company, the building most rich in historic memories memo-ries is St. Mary's church, within the precincts of the Madras fort, St. George, writes A. Hugh Fisher in the Illustrated London News. Standing one Snnilnv innrnintr in the welcome COOl- tne Todas number only a little over t thousand, and are said to be steadil decreasing, which may be partly accounted ac-counted for by their custom of po lyandry. They have preserved their traditions to au extraordinary degree without any written language, and it is only to the complex ritual of their customs and ceremonies that they show the least servility. With an absolute ab-solute belief in their own superiority over the surrounding races, it would be difficult to find a people more innately conservative, but Mr. W. H. Rivers, during his masterly study of this most interesting race, came to the conclu sion that they were far from lacking in intelligence. Their life Is chiefly concerned with the keeping of theii buffalo dairies, and In his records of their mythology Mr. Rivers thus translates trans-lates their own account of Toda origin ori-gin : "Behind On's buffaloes there came out of the earth a man, holding the tail of the last buffalo, and this watt the first Toda. On took one of the man's ribs from the right side of his body and made a woman, who was the tirst Toda woman. The Todas then increased in-creased in number very rapidly, so that at the end of the first week there were about a hundred." One of the finest views in the Nilgiris is that of the Droog from the rocky bluff called Lady Canning's) Seat, about four miles from Coonooi, which is 1,000 feet lower than Ootaca-mund. Ootaca-mund. To this I drove through the woods, one morning just after sunrise, sun-rise, along a road bordered at first with roses and wild heliotrope, past villas and tea plantations, past tall tree ferns and tree rhododendrons crimson with blossom. Suddenly rounding round-ing a corner of the road I came on wider landscape. Grandly from the plains rose the Droog, lrom the steep summit of which Tippoo Sultan is said to have thrown his captives. This, and other cloud-girt heights beyond were all of that deep blue color that gave the Nilgiris their name. ness of the Secretariat buildings, I was upon the site of the earliest inner fort, where divine service was held until St. Mary's church was built in 167S, to remain re-main subject to various additions and alterations the oldest British building build-ing now existing in India. Among the numerous old gravestones now placed along the north and part of the east and west sides of the church is one of Aaron Baker, the first president and governor of Fort St. George, with the oldest British inscription in India, dated 1652. The interior contains the colors of numerous regiments, and so many monuments and tablets to men famous iu the history of the British occupation that the church is sometimes some-times called the Westminster abbey of India. Nor are its records associated only with death and burial. In the font of black granite in 1687 were baptized bap-tized the three daughters of Job Char-nock, Char-nock, whom he had by the Hindu widow he had rescued from the funeral pyre of her husband ; Robert Clive was married here in 1753, not far from the "Writers' Buildings," where, some years previously, he had twice snapped a pistol at his own head ; the name of Arthur Wellesley appears in the register regis-ter as a witness to another marriage in 1798. It is unfortunate that the edifice was not designed in a nobler style than was understood by its architect, archi-tect, the master gunner of the time, whose chief, and very reasonable, care was to make the walls thick and the roof rounded to resist artillery. The Madras museum is especially rich in remains from the Buddhist tope at Amaravati, many of the sculptures sculp-tures from which are familiar to Londoners Lon-doners on the walls of the grand stair- ease in Bloomsbury. Through the Nilgiri Hills. From Madras I went via Erode Junction to Mettupalaiyam, the terminus ter-minus of the broad-gauge railway, and there changed to the narrow gauge which climbs up the Nilgiri hills. The engine was at the rear, and from a seat on the extreme front of the train I was able to watch the scenery to advantage ad-vantage while the lookout man kept his eyes on the metals for any signs of landslip, such as we met in one deep cutting, where a piece of fallen rock lay across the line. We crossed over clefts and gorges, by bridges, through the sleepers on which I could see foaming torrents far below my feet and crept along narrow nar-row ledges with precipitous depths on one side and a rocky height soaring on the other. "Ooty" itself (7,200 feet above sea level) is not unlike Nuwara Eliya in Ceylon, in its natural scenery as well as from the social point of view. Similar Sim-ilar arum lilies were growing near a similar lake, and both places are crowded during the hot weather by Jaded British seeking health and recreation. recre-ation. At the time of my visit, however, how-ever, Ootacamund was empty. There were no happy bachelors under canvas on the golf links, there was no one at the hotels, and St. Stephen's church was almost as deserted as the cricket ground. In small huts on the hillside I saw some Todas. the men wearing a mantle called the "putkuli" thrown round the shoulders without any fastening. fas-tening. . They are distinctly lighter than most of the other aborigines of southern India, and the skin of the women is of a still paler brown than that of the men. Todas Are Interesting. The mountains and hills of India have been the refuge of aborigines who fled before the advance of the Aryans, and in the Todas, as well as In the more northern tribes of the Bhlls, Kols, Ghonds, Santals, and Nn-gas, Nn-gas, may be studied the descendants of those early inhabitants of northern India, allied to the Dravidians, but of Bcythlnn or Mongolian origin. Today, ' |