DIFFERENT OPINIONS REGARDING THE LAKES AND RIVERS. I I 3
fact that the Kailas mountain forms a great water-parting to the north of the southern range of the Himalayas. The Indus starts eastward from its northern slope; the Sutlej takes off to the south-west from its southern side, and the Sanpu, or Brahmaputra, flows eastwards from its eastern base. The Sanskrit mythologists believed that the Ganges issued from the sacred
lake Manasarowar Geographers held that the Sutlej took its rise in the lake, but the true
origin of that river is ascribed by Moorcroft to the Ravama-hrada lake, close to the west of the Manasarowar, and perhaps connected with it.»
So late as in 1886 the Kailas could still be regarded as a great water-parting, though the journeys of the Pundits ought to have taught better. The journey of the Pundit in 1867 to the upper Indus had brought no more light regarding the source of that river, than that it could be supposed to flow eastward from the Kailas, instead of westward from the northern side of the Transhimalaya, the existence of which, even here in the west, was very little known. It is hardly possible to be more distant from the solution of a geographical problem ! The brooks rising from the southern side of the Kailas go to Rakas-tal, and it is hard to see why they should
be called the source of the Satlej. As to the source of the Tsangpo it is curious
that, twenty years after Nain Sing's journey anybody could place it at the eastern base of the Kailas. Hardly anywhere have the fantasies of geographers taken such liberties as in the country round Kailas and the Manasarovar. Almost every new writer has a new sort of geography. The only map which has kept its ground through the storms of nearly two centuries is D'ANVILLE's.
I A few years earlier another compilator, Dr K. GANZENMLLLER, had a far more correct understanding of the hydrography, in saying: »Der Satledsch nimmt seinen Ursprung in (len Seen Mansarowar und Rakus-tal.» Tibet nach den Resultaten Geographischer Forschungen früherer und neuester Zeit, Stuttgart 1878, p. 42.
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