Again, as regards the secrecy with which murders were perpetrated and
all traces of them hidden, Sir W. Sleeman writes: [692] "While I was
in civil charge of the District of Narsinghpur, in the valley of the
Nerbudda, in the years 1822-1824, no ordinary robbery or theft could
be committed without my becoming aware of it, nor was there a robber
or thief of the ordinary kind in the District with whose character I
had not become acquainted in the discharge of my duties as magistrate;
and if any man had then told me that a gang of assassins by profession
resided in the village of Kandeli, [693] not four hundred yards from
my court, and that the extensive groves of the village of Mundesur,
only one stage from me on the road to Saugor and Bhopal, were one
of the greatest _beles_ or places of murder in all India, and that
large gangs from Hindustan and the Deccan used to _rendezvous_ in
these groves, remain in them for many days every year, and carry
on their dreadful trade along all the lines of road that pass by
and branch off from them, with the knowledge and connivance of the
two landholders by whose ancestors these groves had been planted, I
should have thought him a fool or a madman; and yet nothing could have
been more true. The bodies of a hundred travellers lie buried in and
around the groves of Mundesur; and a gang of assassins lived in and
about the village of Kandeli while I was magistrate of the District,
and extended their depredations to the cities of Poona and Hyderabad."