The tract between the Megna and the is often devastated. It is hardly accurate to call it land. Some name should be found for the marshes, chars, khals, dones, and islands of Bakar ganj and the Sunderbans. Every acre in this vast watery wilderness has been brought down from countries hundreds of miles away, and piled up in the sea until the restless rivers have con quered league after league from the deep water, and built a district there. Two of the mightiest streams of earth, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, are for ever at this silent work, and their dis coloured waves roll perpetually- down from the mountains of Tibet and the plains of the North West that red and yellow mud which has formed a province. The larger part of their labours is still hidden under the Bengal Sea, and silt which the leadsman brings up off Saugor Island has come as likely as not some 2000 miles, from Gan gotri or the Jumna. The two great rivers unite in the Megna estuary, sending out a labyrinth of arms and branches which interlace the alluvial soil with a thousand channels, and turn into an archipelago the province which the Brahmaputra and its Indian sister have created. The inter vening islands and islets are like nothing in the world beside themselves. Flat as the Essex and Kentish marshes, monotonous in feature as Lower Egypt, they are yet the most fertile and the greenest country to be seen. The soil, level and clean as a lawn, is richer than even the alluvium of the Nile ; not a square inch of it is bare ; if man does not plant it, the slimy man groves fringe every bank, canes and reeds cover every shoal ; and the drier parts, or kholas, are dressed in waving jungle full of kerua, goma, and gab trees. But the population of Bengal has pushed into this moist and steaming corner of the earth, and nowhere are there such vast rice gardens, such feathery palm groves, and such verdurous orchards of plantain and jack, mango and tamarind, betel, cocoa, and sugar-cane. The Mugh, Muhfuninadans, and Hindus who people this countless host of marshy islets, dispute pos session with crocodiles, tigers, and snakes. The Sunderbans and the Megna flats team with these; and the wood-cutters never return from their yearly expeditions without having paid a tribute of life to the savage animals. Everything and everybody in this watery world know how to fish and to swim. Almost at every mile of travel
you come upon a broad waterway, so that boats ' are the universal vehicle ; and fish of a thousand kinds, some parti-coloured, some monstrous in size, some poisonous, some delicious,—the hilsa, the silon, the koral, and the pangas,—feed beast and man alike in the aquatic desert. The very I leopards devour finny food, and even swim the khals, while huge crocodiles crawl forth into the orchards, and watch for the children fetching water and the herdsmen at the ferries. It is a land of strange swooning sounds, of sweeping tempests, and sudden dislocations of earth under mined and carried off by the rushing rivers. There is an occasional thundering noise heard here called the Barisal guns, and to this day nobody knows its origin. A well-to-do landowner will wake up to find his property wafted away by the Megna or the Madhumati to the other side of the creek ; and others, who have painfully constructed valuable tanks for fresh water, see a single wave of the dreaded ' bore' sweep into the hollow and spoil it for ever. Such victims of nature in the Sunderbans are styled nildi-bhanga log, or river broken people ; ' but for the most part the enor mous population of these Indian swamps fares prosperously, growing betel-nuts for half Asia, catching fish for Calcutta, weaving reed-mats and covers for the boatmen of the Ganges, and pro ducing vast'crops of paddy and sugar-cane. They are, on the whole, a gentle and simple people, largely Muhammadan in creed. At new and full moon the bore' comes up the Megna in a wall of white water 15 feet high, crushing every boat not drawn up,—a terrible rolling bank of foam, which on account of its speed the people call the spar or arrow.
In this great estuary of the Megna, Shahabaz pur, Hattia, and Sandwip are the greatest and the most fertile islands, full of rice grounds and cocoa groves,.with a population of nearly 500,000 souls. These are not unfamiliar with the dangers of their marshy home, for there have been at least seven cyclones since 1822 ; but the islands stand fairly high above the water, and hitherto it is the storm-wind which has wrought most damage, though it generally gives notice of its approach long beforehand by the unnatural hush in the air and the livid colour of the sky. But occasionally there is no warning. •