Borra Cave: Borra village lies about six miles north of Anantagiri, from which it is l)est reached, near the eastern edge of the bills upholding the 3,000 feet plateau. A stream there (which eventually falls into the Peddagunda, an affluent of the Chittivalasa river) disappears suddenly into a low limestone hill, works its way through it along a chain of most interesting limestone caves, full of excellent specimens of stalagmites and stalactites, and eventually reappears again 300 feet lower down in a deep gorge. Like the somewhat similar Guptésvara cave above referred to, the place is accounted holy and a festival is held there at Sivarátri. At one spot on the hill an opening leads abruptly downwards into the top of the largest of the chain of caves below, and one looks down into dim depths from which issues the murmur of running water, as in the place where —
'Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.'
About fifty feet below the northern brow of the hill 1[1] a wide but low entrance leads into this cave. The roof of it, in which is the orifice above mentioned, is crossed or irregularly ribbed with thick, short, curtain-like masses of stalactitic deposit, beautifully fluted and wrinkled, one or two of which, at the sides of the cavern, are connected with the thickly-grouped mounds of stalagmite forming on the floor. The whole interior is covered with dull cream-white travertine, the surface of which sparkles a little owing to minute sparry facets. The stream descends from a series of cavernous recesses above, passes along the eastern side of the cave through a deep rift, and runs down through other caverns to the gorge of the Peddagunda.
This latter stream, further up its course, itself encounters this same limestone; and in one place has cut two channels for itself through a wall of the rock, 20 or 30 yards wide, which bars its passage. These two channels run through the wall one above the other, the upper one having apparently been the outlet before the river wore its way down and made the lower.
Matsya gundam ('fish pool') is a curious pool on the Machéru ('fish river') near the village of Matam, sir miles north-north-west of Pádéru and close under the great Yendrika hill, 5,188 feet above the sea. A barrier of rocks runs right across the river there, and the stream plunges into a great hole and vanishes beneath this, reappearing again about a hundred yards lower
- ↑ 1 See Dr. King's description in Records of the Geol. Surv. of India, xix 154.
