The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organization and Administration c25.4

c25.4

Going to an entirely different part of India, we find that the town adjoining the fortress of Aḥmadnagar in the Dakhin had inside a low wall an immense prickly-pear hedge about twenty feet high. No human being could pass it without cutting it down, a work of the utmost difficulty, as it presented on every side the strongest and most pointed thorns imaginable. Being full of sap, fire would not act upon it, and an assailant while employed in clearing it, would be exposed to the enemy's matchlocks from behind it; thus it was stronger than any *abbatis* or other barrier (Fitzclarence 241). We find another good instance of the adoption of these protective belts of jungle in the case of Bobili, 140 miles N. E. of Vizagapatnam, which was attacked by Bussy in 1757: "An area of five hundred yards or more in every direction is preserved clear, of which the circumference joins the high wood, which is kept thick, three or four miles in breadth, around this centre. Few of these forts admit more than one path through the wood..... The path admits only three men abreast, winds continually, is everywhere commanded by breast-works in the thicket, and has in its course several redoubts, similar to that at the entrance, and like that flanked by breast-works on each hand" (R. Orme "Mil. Trans.", ii, 256). In early Anglo-Indian writers, for instance Wilks, iii, 217, such plantations are styled a "bound-hedge", of which definitions will be found in the glossaries of Major Dirom's and Lieut. Moor's works. "Bound-hedge" = *quasi* "Boundary hedge"?