A TIGERS' HAUNT.
Lonely--difficult to traverse--haunted by wild beasts. Such is thepicture of the great delta of the Ganges, as drawn by Mr. EdmundCandler in _Blackwood's Magazine_. The region of the Sundarbansoccupies four thousand square miles, and is intersected by six hundrednamed and ten times as many unnamed channels. What is not water isthick jungle. The banks of the channels are haunted by crocodiles andred and brown crabs.
"Seeds fall all day long, and germinate at once in the mud, and springup and choke one another, and writhe and struggle for light and room."But this seething mass of vegetation is all mapped out into sections bythe Forest Department. Each section, when the timber is cut, is leftalone for forty years. This statement of itself makes us realize theloneliness of the place.
Wild animals have their lairs in this forest, and the tiger is aserious danger to the woodcutters of the forest, many of whom fall tothe tigers yearly.