国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

THE TIRTAPURI RIVER AND LAKE RAWANHRAD.   31

impossible that any river could issue from Rakas-tal; the channel must be quite full of water, before the Satlej goes out of the western lake. Still it is interesting to notice that the Lamas of Tirtapuri regarded the river as coming from that lake, showing that the periodical fluctuations did not interfere with their view.

Two days farther on, at the foot of the mountains to the right, he beheld a

large sheet of remarkable blue water, called Råwanhrad, said to give rise to the principal branch of the Satûdrå, and to communicate by a river with the lake Mansarowar, named by the natives Mapang. This was written before he had reached the Manasarovar, where he should see that there was no communication at all between the two lakes. As to the Råwanhrad and the Satûdrå he was never to get an opportunity to control that statement.

In his camp at Gangri or Darchan he observed that »a cascade issues from

the rocks just above Darchan, and falls into the Råwanhrad, which is supplied by the melting of the snow on the great mountains at the foot of which it is situated. It is said to surround a considerable extent of mountains, insulating them completely; but this, being the relation of natives, is to be received with caution.»

On the 5th of August they left Darchan and crossed a stream which in five or six branches comes down from the Cailds mountains and disembogues into the Råwanhrad. Finally the Manasarovar was visible and the party camped near a house inhabited by Ge/u ns, which cannot be anything else than Langbo-nan-gompal

Moorcroft remarks that this lake is the most sacred of all places of Hindu worship which he believes depends upon its difficulty of access, its distance from Hindustan, the dangers of the road, and the heavy expenses of the journey for the pilgrims.

Moorcroft has not been able to find out why the lake is called Mapang

by the )Unias or Chinese Tatars». As Hindu geographers had derived the Ganges, the Satrûdrd and the Kålf or Gogra from this lake, and as Moorcroft believed no other European had ever visited it before, he was anxious to settle the question about the two last-mentioned rivers. For, as he says, from his own observation and from those made by Raper, Webb and Hearsay, it was quite clear, that the

Ganges derives its supplies from the melted snow of the Himalayas, and that it does not receive the smallest streamlet from their extreme northern face, nor from a source to the north of them.

Moorcroft was not the first European at the Manasarovar as he believed. Desideri and Freyre had been there before, but the detailed narrative of Desideri was unknown, and in his letters he does not mention the lake; Moorcroft was, at any rate, the first scientifically trained European who ever reached the place.'

= H. H. Wilson, Op. cit, Preface p. XVII. It is more curious that the learned professor Wilson could forget the many Catholic missionaries who had crossed the Himalayas, when he says of Moorcroft: »In this journey (1812) he was the first European to cross the Himalaya, and make his way to the great plain between that and the Kuenlun chain, the situation of the sources of the Indus