The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c16.3

v2.c16.3

The country to the south-east of Cuttack, on the right bank of the Mahānadī, down to the Chilkā Lake, is studded with a large number of low hills—outlying spurs of the great chain of the Eastern Ghats - cropping up on a plain of large expanse These hills consist mostly of gneiss; but those which occur in the Pargannahs of Daṇḍimal and Domapārā are of sandstone, and the area they cover is fringed by a broad band of laterite. Some of the hills are of considerable length; others are small, narrow and isolated. One of these, situated near the village of Jagmārā, in Pargannah Limbāi, stretching north and south, forms a semi-circular belt five miles to the north-west of the Great Tower of Bhuvaneśvara. It is indicated on the maps by the name of Khaṇḍagiri; but the people in its neighbourhood assign different names to its four separate prominences. The north-eastern mound is called Udayagiri or "sunrise hill"; the second, Khaṇḍagiri or "broken hill"; the third, Nīlagiri or "blue hill"; and the fourth, Dhavalagiri or "the white hill", the *Mont Blanc* of Orissa. The first two are separated by a break caused by unequal upheaval of the rock; the fractured surfaces on the opposite sides being such that, if the furthest ends of the two hillocks could be tilted up, the opposing ends would coalesce and form one rock. The chasm is scarcely fifty yards wide in its broadest part, but at the base the two portions touch each other. This fracture has given its specific name to the second hill in question, and the generic name to the entire range. The separations between the second and the third, and the third and the fourth are indicated by slight depressions only.