landscape.³ The aspect of general aridity may even occur earlier in the year in some parts of what was then the Tamil country. The name for this region paalai comes from the flower of a tree which is found in the jungle, and which bears its fruits in the summer season when other fruits and flowers are rare. The tree is not common in South India, now, but is to be met with in profusion in the jungles of what is part of the Tamil Naad of Ceylon, the northern portion of the Island. The paalai tree is a characteristic feature of this region as well as of the warm months of the year, when its fruits seem to be the only relief to animals and way-farers across the jungle.⁴

According to the literary legislation governing ancient Tamil poetry, each one of the five regional landscapes formed the background of poems dealing with definite groups of subjects of love and warfare. In akam poetry, a poet wishing to write a poem on love regarding the union of lovers, their first meetings, their nocturnal trysts, their conversation among themselves or with the maid, the companion of the heroine, had to choose the mountain scenery as the background of his poems. Having located the scene of his poem in the mountains, he was not free to choose his setting in any season of the year. Of the six seasons of the Tamil year he had to choose the season of the coldest part of the year, the most rainy, and the most beset with difficulties. These two were the most characteristic months of the mountain regions when mountainous climate is most itself, namely, during the two lunar months October and November, corresponding approximately to mid-October to mid-December, of the solar year. Neither was he free to describe his subject or his characters with any of the six divisions of the day of twenty-four hours chosen as the scene of his poetic setting. He had preferably to choose a setting at mid-night. Thus the kuriñci region formed the background for “union and related aspects.”⁵ Courtship was the theme of poems with montane scenery as background, since the hills more than any other region afforded

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   ³Cilappatikaaram; Canto XI, 60-66.

   ⁴ T. Ilampuuranar, Porulatikaaram, 5.

   ⁵ T. 952.