A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c7.33

c7.33

The Gulf of Cambay was once frequented by Arab mariners, and in the early days Broach was more prominent than the better port of Surat which rose only after the silting up of the Narmada estuary and the advent of the European traders who first came to India round the Cape of Good Hope. Besides the estuarine mouths of the rivers, there are a number of real island harbours—Diu, Daman, Bombay. The west coast of the peninsula from Daman southwards to Trivandrum possesses a unity of structure, relief, and climate. On details of relief it can be divided into two halves—the northern half being the Konkan coast and the southern the Malabar coast. The term Konkan is now applied to the strip of country below the ghats south of the Damanganga river up to North Kanara. It varies from 20 to 50 miles in width and is intercepted by hills and cliffs jutting into the sea from the ghats, and numbers of little streams forming rapid torrents during the rains but dwindling to insignificant dimensions in the dry weather. Annual floods have carved deep tidal creeks in their mouths which form valuable highways for traffic. These westward-flowing streams become larger in the extreme south, and one of them, the Sharavati, plunges 850 feet downward from the mountains to form the celebrated Gersoppa falls. The coastal plain is thus altogether a difficult country to traverse; where flat it is fertile and capable of yielding valuable crops of rice.