Mysore is full of beauty. As irregularly-shaped as a sponge, it does a balancing act on the Bangalore-Mangalore horizontal which friends had drawn from Madras as a tentative boundary of South India. From the map I could see it forms the southern portion of the Deccan plateau, is clothed in the west with the thick forests of the Malnad country and is generously watered by river systems of the Palar, Cauvery and Tungabhadra, which roll east to the Bay of Bengal.

On clear days, as one gazes noth from Mysore City from 5000 feet in the hills, the country opens like a fan from the hill state of Coorg, on the left, across the far gray waste of Chitaldroog, sprinkled with stone edicts of Ashoka, to the boundary of Andhra. Although Mysore is a gateway to the south, it has the oldest of liaisons with the north. Reading its history reminds us of Mysore's setting as a corridor for many who moved through it to win power and of a few intent on losing it. Among the latter, we find a contemporary of Alexander the Great, Chandragupta Maurya. At the height of his worldly power in the north, the grandfather of Ashoka renounced his empire and moved south to Mysore and to the solitude of hills around Sravana Belagola toward which I was heading.