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Imperial Gazetteer of India, v. 10, p. 225.

CIIIIKA LAKE 225 200 yards wide, separates it from the Bay of Bengal, with which its only connexion is by a single narrow mouth intersecting this ridge towards its centre. On the west and south the lake is walled in by lofty hills, while to the north it loses itself in endless shallows, sedgy banks, and islands just peeping above the surface, formed year by year from the silt which the rivers bring down. The lake spreads out into a pear- shaped, expanse of water 44 miles long, of which the northern half has a mean breadth of about 20 miles, while the south tapers into an irregularly curved point, barely averaging 5 miles wide. Its smallest area is 344 square miles in the dry season, increasing to about 450 during the rainy season; and the average depth is from 3 to 5 feet, scarcely anywhere exceeding 6 feet. The bed is a very few feet below the high-water level of the sea, although in some parts it is slightly below low-water mark. The narrow tidal stream, which rushes through the neck connecting the lake with the sea, suffices to keep the water distinctly salt during the dry months from December to June. But once the rains have set in, and the Bhargavi and Daya rivers come pouring down upon its northern extremity, the sea-water is gradually driven out and the Chilka becomes a fresh-water lake. This changeable mass of water forms one of a series of lacustrine formations along the western shores of the Bay of Bengal, the result of a perpetual war going on between the rivers and the sea-the former struggling to find vent for their water and silt, the latter repelling them with its sand-laden currents. The Chilka may be regarded as a gulf of the original Bay of Bengal. On the south, a bold, barren spur of hills runs down to the coast; on the north the land-making rivers have pushed out their rounded mouths and flat deltas into the ocean. Nor has the sea been idle. Meeting and overmastering the languid river-discharge that enters the Chilka, it has joined the two extremities with a bar of sand, and thus formed a lake. The delicate process of land-making from the river silt at the north-east end of the lake is slowly but steadily going on, while the bar-building sea is still busily at work. Old documents show that a century ago the neck of land dividing the lake from the sea was only from half a mile to a mile broad in places where it is now two miles; and the opening in the bar, which was a mile wide in 178o and had to be crossed in large boats, was described forty years later as choked up. Shortly before 1825 an artificial mouth had to be cut; and although this also rapidly began to silt up, it remained, as late as 1837, more than three times its present breadth. The difficulty in maintaining an outlet from the Chilka forms one of the chief obstacles to utilizing the lake as an escape for the floods that desolate the delta. Engineers report that, although it would be easy and cheap to cut a channel, it would be very costly and difficult to keep it open; and that each successive mouth would speedily choke up and share the fate of its predecessors. VOL. x.