232 THE NAME OF THE MOUNTAINS NORTH OF THE TSANGPO.
Sir MARTIN CONWAY accepted the name I proposed and added some very wise words, which may serve as a splendid text to the many home-made maps of these regions: »It is hardly necessary to say that no study-drawn outline of imagined mountains ever approximates to the actual facts of mountain-contour which an explorer reveals . . . To discuss, therefore, the relative inaccuracies in this or the other sketched in approximation to what different geographers have believed might more or less vaguely represent the actual form of an unexplored range is to waste time. The man who actually traversed previously untraversed ground, is the first to replace deductions and hypotheses by actual knowledge, and thence forward his information becomes the starting-point for all future developments in knowledge.»
Captain CECIL RAWLING, the chief of the Gartok expedition, expressed the following opinion : »Personally, I do not like the term Trans-Himalaya, for by rights this belongs to the range lying immediately to the north of the Himalayas, and between that range and the Brahmaputra. Foreign names and duplication of names are, if possible, to be avoided. May I suggest such a one as Peu Kangri or the Snow mountains of Tibet, or Peu Lho Kangri, a free translation of the Snow mountains of Southern Tibet. Kailas range, the name suggested by Colonel Burrard, is good for that particular range in which Kailas is situated, but, as Dr. Sven Hedin has demonstrated, this is only one of similar ranges, and therefore it hardly seems quite appropriate for the whole system.»
Rawling is not quite correct when he says that I »proved that the range surveyed by Ryder, which runs parallel to, and distant 5o miles from, the north bank of the Brahmaputra, is not surpassed in altitude by any range of mountains right up to the Kwen Luen». For there is no such range. There are several ranges more or less parallel to the Tsangpo. Even on Ryder's map there is no such range, at least not 5o miles north of the Tsangpo. Only at one place is it 50 miles distant, namely at Amchok-tso, but there the Raga-tsangpo comes in between. At another place it is only 3 miles from the Tsangpo. If such a range existed I should have been happy to support the name Rawling proposes, namely the Ryder mountains.
From what Dr. T. G. LONGSTAFF saw when he climbed Gurla-mandata he got the impression that »if any range is to be called Trans-Himalaya, it should be» the one Cunningham called so. He finds Himalayan nomenclature already too complicated for introducing the name Trans-Himalaya, in which I cannot agree as the word trans, as Holdich remarks, places the system beyond the Himalaya and altogether outside of it. The fact that the expression has been proposed three times before does not complicate the question as these proposals were never accepted and nobody remembers them. If »it was to obviate any further extension of the name that Burrard and Hayden labelled the whole of this range the Ladak range, and applied the name Kailas range to that system still further to the north and across the Indus-Brahmaputra trough», it should be remembered, however, that the name
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