2-982-549 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches in India - Slinging Letter-bags across a Nullah in the Rainy Season, 1858. '…the contrivance in use...when the streams and mountain torrents are so much swollen that in many of them the fords have become impassable. The dawk-wala cares little for a drenching shower of rain. Being himself not incumbered with much to get wet in the shape of clothes, and the bags in which the letters are locked being watertight, he welcomes a smart fall of rain as a refreshing shower-bath...The violence with which a mountain torrent descends to the plains in India is inconceivable to most Europeans. Sweeping before it all movable obstacles, it... [leaves] immense gaps and ravines...forming rivers and lakes in the low ground where but a few hours only before you looked for jungle-pathways and paddy-fields...it becomes a question of considerable interest to him whether certain nullahs which he knows he will have to encounter are fordable or not...Should the next stream prove to be unfordable, his progress is stopped, but he will find that a relay is ready on the opposite shore, and a rope suspended across the water: upon this rope he strings his letter-bags, attaching a second rope, by which the burden...is drawn along its perilous way'. From "Illustrated London News", 1858.