encamped on the site of the present town on his way to Benares, CHAP. I.
General Description. and, being pleased with the place, built a shrine to Vaisákha, his favourite deity, just south of Lawson's Bay there. Encroachments of the sea are supposed to have long since swept away this building, but it is said to have given its name to the town and its traditional site is still supposed to be an auspicious spot for religious bathings. The name is popularly shortened to 'Vizag,' and the form 'Vizac' was in use from almost the earliest days of the English occupation of the district in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Similar abbreviations for Gajapatinagaram and Srungavarapukóta are badly needed.
Vizagapatam and the four other northernmost districts of the Presidency are known as 'the Northern Circars.' This name dates from the time of the Musalman occupation (see p. 30), when the five 'Sarkárs' (divisions of territory) in the north (the chief town of which was Masulipatam) were Guntúr, Kondapalli, Ellore, Rajahmundry and Chicacole. The Chicacole Circar included the present Ganjám and Vizagapatam districts.
Vizagapatam consists, broadly speaking, of the two great Natural divisions. natural divisions already mentioned; namely, the strip of land along the coast and the hills which flank it on the north and west. The hills, however, as will be seen immediately, comprise several widely differing areas.
The strip of land along the coast drains eastward to the Bay of Bengal by the series of rivers referred to below. In the north of it, the Pálkonda taluk consists for the most part of rather monotonous wet land. Further south, Chípurupalle and Bobbili are also somewhat treeless and unlovely. But the rest of it (though barren, scrub-covered intervals occur) is chiefly made up of an undulating expanse of fertile soil (mostly red, but changing to black in the basins of the rivers and other alluvial spots) which is picturesquely diversified by numerous groves and hundreds of low, bare, red and black hills.
In Sarvasiddhi and Anakápalle these hills are wonderfully alike in appearance, being whale-backed in outline and seamed with black rocks showing through the sparse scrub like ribs. They are generally scattered at hap-hazard, but sometimes they are arranged in long lines, and then they have an almost comic resemblance to a solemn procession of some vast monsters silently following one another in Indian file.
The inland parts of this strip of land differ in aspect from those next the shore. Inland, the basins of the streams are occupied by almost continuous stretches of rice-fields, and much