Among the great rivers of India the Gōdávari takes rank next after the Ganges and Indus. It runs nearly across the peninsula, its course is 900 miles long, and it receives the
drainage from 115,000 square miles, an area greater than that of England and Scotland combined. Its maximum discharge is calculated to be one and a half million cubic feet per
second, more than 200 times that of the Thames at Staines and about three times that of the Nile at Cairo.*[1]
It rises at Trimbak, a village about seventy miles north-east of Bombay and only fifty miles from the Arabian Sea. The place traditionally regarded as the source of the river is a reservoir on a hill behind the village. This is approached by a flight of 690 stone steps, and the water trickles into it drop by drop from the lips of a carven image, shrouded by a canopy of stone.†[2] From thence the river flows in a south-easterly direction until, after it has completed a course of 650 miles, it receives from the north at Siróncha the waters of the Wardha, the Painganga and the Wainganga united in the single noble stream of the Pránhita, From this point the river has some 200 miles to run to the Bay of Bengal. It is soon joined by the Indrávati, also from the north, and before long skirts the Bhadráchalam taluk of this district. A few miles below the Bhadráchalam border is the Dummagúdem anicut, almost the sole relic of the great scheme conceived by Sir Arthur Cotton (see p. 80) for the navigation of the upper waters of the river. Next the beautiful Saveri (or Sabari) flows in from the north, skirting the edge of the forest-clad Rékapalle hills. From there the Eastern Ghats come into view, some 2,500 feet in average height, bounding the whole horizon and towering above the lesser and detached hills that flank the river.
The Gódávari has by this time assumed imposing proportions, being generally a mile, and sometimes two and a half miles, broad. After its junction with the Saveri, however, its bed is suddenly contracted by spurs of the gháts till at length it forces a passage between them, penetrating by an almost precipitous gorge to the very heart of the range- The scenery of this gorge is famous for its beauty. The steep wooded slopes of the mountains which overhang it approach at one place to within 200 yards of each other; and they constantly recede and advance and form a succession of beautiful little lakes from which there is apparently no outlet. Here and there a faint line of smoke indicates the
