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

I{

38

WILLIAM AIOORCROFT'S JOURNEY TO THE I1ANASAROVAR.

this he is wrong, as the Tirtapuri river comes from the Rakas-tal, and the other is the Gyanima river. Here his map is also wrong.

His way now goes over Kien-lung, Dûmpû and Daba. Once he heard of the riding post from Gartok to Lhasa or »Ouchong», a distance which he calculates at 88o miles. But we leave his further adventures and narrow escapes on the way back over the Niti pass to India.

His map, Pl. III, forms a highly interesting document, and was, for its time, a great addition to geography. The two lakes are marked between the very regular ranges of Himachal Mts. and Cailås Mts. running N.W. to S.E.

Mt. Cailåsa is placed on the map on the range Cailås Mts. After Desideri, Moorcroft was the first European who saw this part of the Transhimalaya.

»Lake Md.pång or Manas-sarôwar» is not far from correct, whereas Rdwanbrad is very bad. Only its N.E. corner, where his route was nearest, is good. His greatest mistake is to represent the Tirtapuri river as beginning from the plains south of the Kailas Mts., instead of from Rakas-tal and to represent the Gyanima tributary which joins a little below Tirtapuri as being the branch coming from the lake. In 1812 no water could possibly issue from the Rakas-tal, as there was not even a channel between the two lakes. Even when this channel, nowadays occasionally carries water, there is, as a rule, no efflux through the old Satlej-bed. As the natives obviously have told Moorcroft there was really a river going out of the Rakas-tal, this lets us suspect that there was an efflux in 1796 and 1804 and that the natives reported their experiences from then.

RITTER discusses in his usual able and thorough way the results of Moor-croft's journey.' From the knowledge of his time Ritter could not know, that all these pretended discoveries were imaginary. For, as we have seen, Moorcroft was not even the first European at the lakes, which had also been so well mapped already a hundred years before his time. And he never visited those parts of the country where the sources of the Satlej and the Indus are situated. But Ritter is right in calling him an audacious and excellent observer, whose journey cleared up many dark points in western Tibet and also regarding the communication between this country and Turkestan. In the discussion he again says that through him the upper and real courses of the Satlej and the Indus were discovered and that he was the first European who visited and discovered the sacred lakes».

On his road from Gertope to the Manasarovar he passed the sources of the Indus, says Ritter. He also saw and crossed the table-land that is the water-parting between the Indus and the Satlej.2

I Will. Moorcroft's Uebersteigung des Niti-Ghat und Entdeckung der heiligen Seen, der Ssetledschund Indus-Quellen, und der Umgebungen des Kailas, 1812. Erdkunde von Asien, Band II, p. 504.

2 »Aus drei Hauptarmen fliesst dieser merkwürdige P]ateaustrom zusammen, der als der wahre Proteus, zu allen jenen Verwirrungen zwischen Ganges und Indus, von jeher, die Veranlassung gegeben, weil er offenbar die geographisch vermittelnde Rolle zwischen beiden spielt.»