The Times of Friday gives an account of one of
the most striking engineering feats ever undertaken. Colonel John Pennycuick, who has just been made a C.S.I. on the corn- 4aletion of the Periyar irrigation works, has succeeded in reversing the order of nature, and has made a river flow east which, since the Indian continent was formed, has always sowed west. It is the peculiarity of Southern India that there is plenty of rain on the west coast and a perpetual deficiency • on the east; that while the rivers flowing west have abundant streams, those on the east are often dry. The Indian Public Works Department, which thinks nothing of correcting the oversights of Providence, determined to set this right, and called a river from the west side of the Ghats across the water- :shed, to redress the balance. They dammed the Periyar river near its source, and turned its valley into a huge reservoir. They then made a tunnel under the watershed—a tunnel -nearly seven thousand feet long—and let the water into an irrigation canal, flowing down the valley of the Vargai, on the east side of the Ghats. The result will be the irrigation -of two hundred and twenty square miles, at a cost of not more than half a million sterling. The region in which the -works were carried out is a roadless mountain-jungle, full of tigers and elephants. The latter seem, indeed, to have caused some trouble,—one of them being with difficulty pre- vented from evicting the Governor of Madras when he went to inaugurate the works. The achievement is a great one, and as romantic as that of the Roman Consul who turned a river over a precipice out of the way of his legion.
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