The Góstani (also called the Champavati) CHAP. I. Rivers. The Goutami. The Langulya. rises just north of this last and flows in an almost parallel course past Gajapatinagaram into the sea near the Kónada salt-factory.
The Lángulya, called the Nágávali in the upper part of its course, is a perennial stream which has its source among the steep hills of the Ráyagada taluk and the Kálahandi State. It flows nearly due south, past Ráyagada, to within six miles east of Párvatípur; and then turns slightly eastwards and enters the Bay at Mahfuz Bandar, near Chicacole in Ganjám district. For the last twenty miles of its course it forms the boundary between Ganjám and Vizagapatam. The trunk road crosses it at Chicacole on a fine bridge. At Ráyagada it rushes through a narrow passage close under the lee of a wooded hill, and over a most picturesque double fall. The upper part of this is about 20 feet high and 60 yards wide, and the river dashes over a sort of natural anicut, formed by an almost level ridge of rock, into a deep pool below. Issuing from this, it leaps the lower fall, about 30 feet, and swirls through a deep channel strewn and flanked with enormous boulders (about several of which local legends are told) until at length it arrives at a placid reach below. In the storm in the autumn of 1905,when the river was in very high flood, a woman with a baby in her arms, supported by a sort of life-belt of bamboos, was being conveyed across the stream some distance above the falls when she was swept away by the current and, incredible as it may appear to those who see the place when the river is low, was carried right over both these falls and through the maze of boulders below them without injury to herself or the child.
Just below the falls the Nágávali is joined by its first important tributary, the Kumbikóta-gedda, a stream which runs from the west in a deep and narrow gorge and is crossed at Ráyagada by a girder road bridge (see p. 142) standing nearly 100 feet above its bed. Some ten miles higher up the whole body of this stream is forced through a narrow cleft in the rocks across which a man can jump.
Twenty miles below this confluence, at Gumpa, the river receives the Janjhávati, which drains the tangle of little valleys round Náráyanapatnam, and still lower down it is joined by the united streams of the Suvarnamukhi and Végavati, which run from the 3,000 feet plateau in almost parallel courses across Bobbili taluk.
The irrigation from the Nágávali and the Suvarnamukhi, and the dam which it is proposed to throw across the former, are referred to on p. 106 below.