GAZETTEER
Bodakonda, rises to about 1,000 feet. No native will go up this. A goddess named Sambari lives there and animal sacrifices are made to her. One day, says the story, a man went to her temple just after the sacrifice to fetch a brass pot which he had forgotten, and came upon the goddess drinking the blood of the offerings. She was furious at being seen, and flung his pot two miles away, where it made a deep hole (still shown) in a piece of rock. Since then no native has ventured up the hill. A survey party of Europeans, it is locally declared, laughed at the superstition and set out one fine day to take bearings from the top of the hill. But they had hardly got half way up when they were surrounded by a forest fire which burnt up much of their kit and so frightened a horse they had with them that it bolted over a precipice and was killed.
Krishnadévipet; Sixteen miles west of Narasapatam and close under the hills. A thriving little place of 493 inhabitants which, like Kondasanta at the foot of the Lammasingi ghát, does a busy trade in the produce of the hills, such as tamarind, saffron, gall-nuts, long pepper, honey, bees' wax, soap-nut, horns, mustard and kamela dye. It is full of money-lenders, who have obtained possession on mortgage of much land in the Antáda mutta. Water is difficult to get, as the village is perched high above a river-bed.
Lótugedda ('deep stream') stands about 26 miles in a direct line north-north-west of Narasapatam among the Golgonda hills.It contains the ruins of three or four old granite temples dedicated to Siva, in the largest of which the sculpture is elaborate. One odd group depicts 1 [1]four men with long pointed beards and long pigtails, carrying pickaxes on their shoulders, holding out their hands to receive a reward which a king, sitting on a throne with three ladies behind him, is in the act of bestowing. The villagers say the men are the builders of the temple, and are content to account for the long beards by the conjecture that barbers were probably rare on the hills in those days. On three sides of a pillar here are Telugu inscriptions.
Narasapatam: Head-quarters of the Divisional Officer, Assistant Superintendent of Police and tahsildar, and a union of 10,589 inhabitants. It is 19 miles north-west of the railway-station called Narasapatam Road and in wet weather the journey thence is unpleasant, as the road crosses several unbridged streams and in one place shares a narrow gorge with the Varáha river. An estimate for diverting the road awaits allotment of
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- ↑ 1 G.O.,No. 1941, Judicial, dated 23rd November 1882.
