Generally, however, during the extreme drought, when unable to procure their ordinary food from the drying up of the watercourses, they bury themselves in the mud, and remain in a state of torpor till released by the recurrence of rains.[1] At Arne-tivoe, in the eastern province, whilst riding across the parched bed of the tank, I was shown the recess, still bearing the form and impress of a crocodile, out of which the animal had been seen to emerge the day before.  A story was also related to me of an officer attached to the department of the Surveyor-General, who, having pitched his tent in a similar position, was disturbed during the night by feeling a movement of the earth below his bed, from which on the following day a crocodile emerged, making its appearance from beneath the matting.[2]

[Footnote 1:  HERODOTUS records the observations of the Egyptians that the crocodile of the Nile abstains from food during the four winter months.—­Euterpe, lviii.]

[Footnote 2:  HUMBOLDT relates a similar story as occurring at Calabazo, in Venezuela.—­Personal Narrative, c, xvi.]

The fresh water species that inhabits the tanks is essentially cowardly in it instincts, and hastens to conceal itself on the appearance of man.  A gentleman (who told me the circumstance), when riding in the jungle, overtook a crocodile, evidently roaming in search of water.  It fled to a shallow pool almost dried by the sun, and, thrusting its head into the mud till it covered up its eyes, remained unmoved in profound confidence of perfect concealment.  In 1833, during the progress of the Pearl Fishery, Sir Robert Wilmot Horton employed men to drag for crocodiles in a pond which was infested by them in the immediate vicinity of Aripo.  The pool was about fifty yards in length, by ten or twelve wide, shallowing gradually to the edge, and not exceeding four or five feet at the deepest part.  As the party approached the bund, from twenty to thirty reptiles, which had been basking in the sun, rose and fled to the water.  A net, specially weighted so as to sink its lower edge to the bottom, was then stretched from bank to bank and swept to the further end of the pond, followed by a line of men with poles to drive the crocodiles forward:  so complete was the arrangement, that no individual could have evaded the net, yet, to the astonishment of the Governor’s party, not one was to be found when it was drawn on shore, and no means of escape for them was apparent or possible except by their descending into the mud at the bottom of the pond.

The lagoon of Batticaloa, and indeed all the still waters of this district, are remarkable for the numbers and prodigious size of the crocodiles which infest them.  Their teeth are sometimes so large that the natives mount them with silver lids and use them for boxes to carry the powdered chunam, which they chew with the betel leaf.  During one of my visits to the lake a crocodile was caught within a few yards