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THEY appeared early one morning in the south-west, very faint and so like clouds that I had to get out the telescope. There had been something about them, even to the naked eye, not quite cloud-like, and the telescope showed them to be hills. They had elected to come out of a retirement which had lasted several months, and from that day forward appeared when the weather suited them, and disappeared when it didn't. We struck up a nodding acquaintance, and this developed later into a friendship. tainly they were very inviting -but then all distant hills are that in a general wayand I am shy of general invitations. So many of these cool, blue, misty, hilly invitations have I accepted, only to find on arrival something akin to ashes, cinders, dust. But the more I gazed on these hills, the stronger their lure. I found in a good atlas that they were about sixty miles distant. I learnt that they were sparsely inhabited by a species of my countrymen who grew tea and coffee, but who kept a discreet silence about the game that abounded there, game on virgin ground, seldom now to be met with in India. Rumour added that the plant

I.

jealous in the strictly Mosaic sense, and that they commanded all approaches to their game country with extreme watchfulness, and admitted no man outside the planter species.

Enough said. One morning a crystal-clear one-the hills stood out so plain that the cliffs and scars on their inviting foreheads could be seen without the aid of telescope. I had known them now а matter of some months, and I said I would go.

The next thing was to get an introduction to one of the jealous people. Chance threw this in my way. I found him no whit jealous, only hospitable and helpful. He was a large man, much tanned, wearing a coat and trousers, but with a distinct flavour of shirt-sleeves and shorts about him. One of the old class of planters, a pioneer-one of the first to penetrate those delectable hills, and carve out his tea estate from the virgin forest, very remote and very lonely. Then others came, and tea companies arose, and more forests were cleared, and bungalows appeared here and there, and roads came, and motors were invented.

And another kind of planter came-not quite of the same class as the pioneer

rally goes first in these matters. My friend had seen it all from the very beginning, and now was thinking of clearing out. He showed me a little plot of ground later on, near where his two-storied house now is, where in a tent he had lived so long alone in the old days. He told me none of these things -they came out in casual talk; and the little plot of ground where the tent had been was introduced and dismissed with scarcely more than a wave of the hand in a couple of sentences. The other kind of man might have sentimentalised and not told me half as much.

He did tell me something about certain game I should see (always with the proviso "if the clouds are not down "). I am sorry to confess that I took this information with some salt. Too often had I been the victim of enthusiasts, who forgot that what they were telling me I should see in a given place was really what they had seen in a score or so of years and in many places.

My planter friend, however, had understated things rather than overstated them. I saw all he said I should see, and

more.

On the hills where I was living when I first saw the Green Hills-I call them green because when I got to them they were quite the greenest things I had ever seen-the rain falls in a very generous fashion from about May to

October, and for about ten glorious days, it lets up. The wind takes a breather, and then back it all comes again from the opposite quarterclouds, winds, and rain till the end of December or early January. If you want to go anywhere or see anything, you must choose that period of ten days. The trouble is that the weather does not work to a time-table, and the "break in the rains," as it is called, may come early in October, half-way through the month, or right at its end. Sometimes it never comes at all.

My friend insisted that when I came I must hit off the break," otherwise the Green Hills would be swaddled in cloud, nothing could be shot because nothing could be seen, and to be caught out in the clouds was dangerous.

There was nothing to do but to make a shot at it. So about mid-October, when there were signs of a break, I packed off my servant and kit, and a few days later, on a cloudless morning, I started. In a bee-line I had about sixty miles to go

first of all 6000 feet down from my own hill-tops, then a great flatness of forty miles, and then 5000 feet up the side of the Green Hills to the perch where dwelt my host. Within

an hour of starting we had passed from an almost English climate to steamy tropics, and had shot out into the apparently boundless plains. Due south we

course, although to-day invisible, lay the great barrier of the Green Hills. It was not till we were fifteen miles from them that they grew unwillingly into view, at first just a hint of hills without an outline, then an outline without details, then details-chiefly rather sorrowful ones-precipices, gullies, scars, and slopes, all gushing water. The clouds were down on the hill-tops to within about 4000 feet of their base, and there ceased abruptly and in a perfectly straight-ruled line.

A poor welcome, quotha, after so warm and repeated an invitation. Still, we drove ahead along the plain which ran merrily on till suddenly, without the usual foothills or easier slopes, it met those seemingly perpendicular hillsides where our horizontal plane was to be exchanged for a vertical one. The closer we approached, the more burning my curiosity as to how a car would find its way up. My driver, however, had done it often before, and the most that he would say was that "it wanted a little driving." It did.

Nothing, however, is so completely camouflaged as ground by ground. And ground, not actual precipice, is never so steep as it looks from a distance. Crest-line merges into the slope from a higher crestline and is lost. Spur loses itself against the slopes of a greater spur behind it, and the valley or ravine between them is

in a short mile of many a little harbour in the English Channel and wonder where the crabbers will get to if it comes on to blow. But the harbour is there completely camouflaged. Polperro on the Cornish coast is a good example.

Presently, just as I was at my wits' end, we opened a ravine, and the road popped into it and continued up it. But it was a dead-end: a real steep-as-a-house hillside blocked it. Engineers, however, are not dead-ended so easily. With an amazing series of zigzags the road patterned the whole of that, in some places, quite vertical hillside. My companion warmed a little over this, and when we were about half-way up the zigzags and were watering the car, he told me to count how many roads I could see above me and how many below. There were six of each. Then we ran into the cloud-line, and there was no need of water. We were now on the forest-clad knees of the Green Hills, which were completely wrapped in cloud and invisible far above us. We lurched along over a very pot-holey road, between two walls of forest, amidst swirls of mist and a steady downpour of rain. There was a momentary view of two startled elephants at a clearing on the roadside, the attendants with a puny restraining hand laid on the trunk of each. Then the cloud swallowed them and they were gone. Yet the picture of those

rally goes first in these matters. My friend had seen it all from the very beginning, and now was thinking of clearing out. He showed me a little plot of ground later on, near where his two-storied house now is, where in a tent he had lived so long alone in the old days. He told me none of these things -they came out in casual talk; and the little plot of ground where the tent had been was introduced and dismissed with scarcely more than a wave of the hand in a couple of sentences. The other kind of man might have sentimentalised and not told me half as much.

He did tell me something about certain game I should see (always with the proviso "if the clouds are not down "). I am sorry to confess that I took this information with some salt. Too often had I been the victim of enthusiasts, who forgot that what they were telling me I should see in a given place was really what they had seen in a score or so of years and in many places.

My planter friend, however, had understated things rather than overstated them. I saw all he said I should see, and

more.

On the hills where I was living when I first saw the Green Hills-I call them green because when I got to them they were quite the greenest things I had ever seen the rain falls in a very generous fashion from about May to

October, and for about ten glorious days, it lets up. The wind takes a breather, and then back it all comes again from the opposite quarterclouds, winds, and rain till the end of December or early January. If you want to go anywhere or see anything, you must choose that period of ten days. The trouble is that the weather does not work to a time-table, and the "break in the rains," as it is called, may come early in October, half-way through the month, or right at its end. Sometimes it never comes at all.

My friend insisted that when I came I must hit off the break," otherwise the Green Hills would be swaddled in cloud, nothing could be shot because nothing could be seen, and to be caught out in the clouds was dangerous.

There was nothing to do but to make a shot at it. So about mid-October, when there were signs of a break, I packed off my servant and kit, and a few days later, on a cloudless morning, I started. In a bee-line I had about sixty miles to go

first of all 6000 feet down from my own hill-tops, then a great flatness of forty miles, and then 5000 feet up the side of the Green Hills to the perch where dwelt my host. Within

an hour of starting we had passed from an almost English climate to steamy tropics, and had shot out into the apparently boundless plains. Due south we

course, although to-day invisible, lay the great barrier of the Green Hills. It was not till we were fifteen miles from them that they grew unwillingly into view, at first just a hint of hills without an outline, then an outline without details, then details-chiefly rather sorrowful ones-precipices, gullies, scars, and slopes, all gushing water. The clouds were down on the hill-tops to within about 4000 feet of their base, and there ceased abruptly and in a perfectly straight-ruled line.

A poor welcome, quotha, after so warm and repeated an invitation. Still, we drove ahead along the plain which ran merrily on till suddenly, without the usual foothills or easier slopes, it met those seemingly perpendicular hillsides where our horizontal plane was to be exchanged for a vertical one. The closer we approached, the more burning my curiosity as to how a car would find its way up. My driver, however, had done it often before, and the most that he would say was that "it wanted a little driving." It did.

Nothing, however, is so completely camouflaged as ground by ground. And ground, not actual precipice, is never so steep as it looks from a distance. Crest-line merges into the slope from a higher crestline and is lost. Spur loses itself against the slopes of a greater spur behind it, and the valley or ravine between them is

in a short mile of many a little harbour in the English Channel and wonder where the crabbers will get to if it comes on to blow. But the harbour is there completely camouflaged. Polperro on the Cornish coast is a good example.

Presently, just as I was at my wits' end, we opened a ravine, and the road popped into it and continued up it. But it was a dead-end: a real steep-as-a-house hillside blocked it. Engineers, however, are not dead-ended so easily. With an amazing series of zigzags the road patterned the whole of that, in some places, quite vertical hillside. My companion warmed a little over this, and when we were about half-way up the zigzags and were watering the car, he told me to count how many roads I could see above me and how many below. There were six of each. Then we ran into the cloud-line, and there was no need of water. We were now on the forest-clad knees of the Green Hills, which were completely wrapped in cloud and invisible far above us. We lurched along over a very pot-holey road, between two walls of forest, amidst swirls of mist and a steady downpour of rain. There was a momentary view of two startled elephants at a clearing on the roadside, the attendants with a puny restraining hand laid on the trunk of each. Then the cloud swallowed them and they were gone. Yet the picture of those