Note 7 — A Halt in the Valley.

July 15.—Marched at dawn for Vernagh, a distance of eight kos, rather over a Sabbath-day’s journey. Here we had to wait a considerable time for our breakfast, the cook being an indifferent pedestrian and the day a very hot one. The baradurree was curiously built, close to an octagon tank, the water from which ran at a great pace through an arch in the middle of the house.7 The tank was supplied with water in great volume, but from no apparent source, and was filled with fine fish, all sacred, and as fat as butter, from the plentiful support they receive from the devout among the Hindoos, not to mention the unbelieving travellers, who also supply them for amusement. The tank itself, the natives informed us, was bottomless, and it really appeared to be so; for from the windows of the baradurree, some fifty feet over the water, we could see the sides stretching back as they descended, and losing themselves in the clear water, which looked, from the intensity of its blue, both deep and treacherous to an unlimited extent. The water, too, was so intensely, icily cold, that an attempt to swim across it would have been a dangerous undertaking, and neither F. nor I could summon courage to jump in. We, however, bathed in the stream which ran out of the inexhaustible reservoir, and its effect we found very similar to that of hot water, so that a little of it went a very long way with us. As for the fish, they swarmed in such numbers that they jostled each other fairly out of the water in a dense living mass, while striving for grains of rice and bread.