National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

But from the middle of April until August it carries a large volume of water,
inundating both banks, and is then quite unfordable, a ferry being regularly
maintained at the mouth of the Kandar Kas. For the preceding three years the
current had at the head of this river branch set increasingly towards Jalālpur
(see Skeleton Map 1), apparently as a result of exceptional floods having come
down from Kashmīr. The extent of the inundation caused was marked by large
trunks of timber we found left on the opposite bank for a distance of about 550
yards before reaching the cultivated portion of the island. The island is occupied
by the small hamlet of Admāna and scattered groups of homesteads reckoned
with it. The fact of the whole of the cultivated area of Admāna being included
within the boundary of the Gujrāt District to the south suggests that at a time
not very distant the main branch of the river lay approximately along the
Halkiwānī bed.

The length of the island is shown by the one-inch map of the Survey, No. 43.
H. 6 (1911) as slightly over 6 miles in a direct line. Our rapid plane-table
survey of the island indicated practically the same length, a reduction of about
half a mile at the lower end of the island where the Halkiwānī rejoins a southern
channel of the river being compensated by a corresponding accretion at the
upper. The maximum width of the island on a line passing Admāna hamlet is
close on 1½ miles, and has remained unchanged since 1911. High tamarisk and
other bushes cover a great deal of the ground left uncultivated, and in a
'Reserved Forest' area, known as Mājhi Rakh, a thick wood of fine trees has
grown up.

It is certain that the island of Admāna as it exists now is by far the largest of
any which the Survey maps show in the Jhēlum within the whole length of its
course that can come into consideration here. This point deserves to be specially
noticed. Though islands in a river like the Jhēlum are liable to changes, yet the
general course of the river and the character of its bed just along this section are
not likely to have changed greatly during the last two thousand years or so; for
they are here largely determined by two permanent geographical features, the
Jalālpur-Dilāwar hill spur on the one side and the high ground at the end of the
Pabbi range facing it on the other.

Curtius tells us that the island which masked Alexander's crossing was
'larger than the rest, wooded and suitable for concealing an ambuscade'.¹¹ If we
then assume that in Alexander's time there stretched from below Jalālpur an
island much of the same size and type as the present island of Admāna, it is easy
to follow the successive phases of the crossing as recorded by Arrian. Moving
down a channel approximately corresponding to the present Halkiwānī, the