"THE Long Trail A-Winding."
Who that has read "Kim" will ever forget Kipling's picture of the Grand
Trunk Road, with its endless panorama of beggars, Brahmans, Lamas, and
talkative old women on pilgrimage? Such roads cover India's plains with
a network of interlacing lines, for one of Britain's achievements on
India's behalf has been her system of metalled roads, defying alike the
dust of the dry season and the floods of the monsoon.
One such road I have in mind, a road leading from the old fortress town
of Vellore through twenty-three miles of fertile plain, to Gudiyattam,
at the foot of the Eastern Ghats. It is just a South Indian "up country"
road, skirting miles of irrigated rice fields, gold-green in their
beginnings, gold-brown in the days of ripening and reaping. It winds
past patches of sugar cane and cocoanut palm; then half arid uplands,
where goats and lean cattle search for grass blades that their
predecessors have overlooked; then the _bizarre_ shapes of the ghats,
wide spaces open to the play of sun and wind and rain, of passing shadow
and sunset glory. They are among the breathing spaces of earth, which no
man hath tamed or can tame.