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0138 Southern Tibet : vol.7
Southern Tibet : vol.7 / Page 138 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000263
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CHAPTER XI.

       

ORME, DOW, DU HALDE, DE MAILLA, RENNELL, TIEFFEN-

THALER, WAHL, WILFORD, AND OTHERS.

     

When ROBERT ORME, in about i 760, wrote his history of British transactions in India,' he felt, as DEGUIGNES, the necessity of creating a geographical foundation or a description of the scene where these transactions so far had taken place.

In his introduction he speaks of the Kailas and of the presumed sources of the Ganges, and here we easily recognize the mistakes originally made by the Lama-

Surveyors:

At the foot of the mountains called Kentassi, in the country of Thibet, and in that part of them which lays between the thirty-first and thirty-second degree of latitude and between the ninety-eighth and the hundredth degree of longitude, the Ganges, formed from several sources, passes successively two great lakes, and flows to the west until the opposition of a part of the Indian Caucasus turns it to the south, and soon after to the southeast, when at length, flowing due south, and having completed in these various directions a course of two hundred leagues, it enters India by forcing its passage through the mountains of the frontier.

ORME is not nearly so clear -sighted as DEGUIGNES. In another work of his we only find the following passages regarding the mountains north of India.2

That part of the western side of Indostan which is not bounded by the sea, is separated from Persia and the Usbeg Tartary by desarts, and by those mountains which were known to the ancients under the name of Paropamisus. The course of mount Caucasus forms its barrier to the north, and separates it from various nations of Tartars, from the Great and Little Thibet. Where mount Caucasus ceases, marshes and rivers divide it from the kingdoms of Tepra, Assam, and Aracan , and circumscribe to the eastward the dominions of the Mogul, until they reach the sea at Chitigan.

In the following passage he seems to regard mount Caucasus as bordering the plains of Tartary to the south, disregarding the immense highlands of Tibet: »The

     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

I Robert Orme: A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan from

the year

2 MDCCXLV. London, MDCCLXIII, Vol. I, p. 14.

Robert Orme : Historical Fragmentsof the Mogul Empire of the Morattoes, and of the English Concerns in indostan; from the year MDCLIX, etc. London, MDCCCV, P. 457 and 462.