I was told by these courtiers how often the young chief had, during the day, asked when he could have the happiness of seeing me; and the old chief was told, in my hearing, how many good things I had said since I came into his territories, all tending to his honour and my credit.  This is a species of barefaced flattery to which we are all doomed to submit in our intercourse with these native chiefs; but still, to a man of sense, it never ceases to be distressing and offensive; for he can hardly ever help feeling that they must think him a mere child before they could venture to treat him with it.  This is, however, to put too harsh a construction upon what in reality, the people mean only as civility; and they, who can so easily consider the grandfathers of their chiefs as gods, and worship them as such, may be suffered to treat us as heroes and sayers of good things without offence.[12]

We ascended to the summit of the old palace, and were well repaid for the trouble by the view of an extremely rich sheet of wheat, gram, and other spring crops, extending to the north and east, as far as the eye could reach, from the dark belt of forest, three miles deep, with which the Raja has surrounded his capital on every side as hunting grounds.  The lands comprised in this forest are, for the most part, exceedingly poor, and water for irrigation is unattainable within them, so that little is lost by this taste of the chief for the sports of the field, in which, however, he cannot himself now indulge.

On the 19th[13] we left Datiya, and, after emerging from the surrounding forest, came over a fine plain covered with rich spring crops for ten miles, till we entered among the ravines of the river Sindh, whose banks are, like those of all rivers in this part of India, bordered to a great distance by these deep and ugly inequalities.  Here they are almost without grass or shrubs to clothe their hideous nakedness, and have been formed by the torrents, which, in the season of the rains, rush from the extensive plain, as from a wide ocean, down to the deep channel of the river in narrow streams.  These streams cut their way easily through the soft alluvial soil, which must once have formed the bed of a vast lake.[14] On coming through the forest, before sunrise we discovered our error of the day before, for we found excellent deer-shooting in the long grass and brushwood, which grow luxuriantly at some distance from the city.  Had we come out a couple of miles the day before, we might have had noble sport, and really required the forbearance and humanity to which we had so magnanimously resolved to sacrifice our ‘pride of art’ as sportsmen; for we saw many herds of the nilgai, antelope, and spotted deer,[15] browsing within a few paces of us, within the long grass and brushwood on both sides of the road.  We could not stay, however, to indulge in much sport, having a long march before us.

Notes: 

1.  Some readers may be shocked at the notion of the author shooting pig, but, in Bundelkhand, where pig-sticking, or hog-hunting, as the older writers call it, is not practised, hog-shooting is quite legitimate.