MOUNTAINS, HILLS, AND PLAINS

The Great Northern Rampart.—The huge mountain rampart which guards the northern frontier of India thrusts out in the north-west a great bastion whose outer walls are the Hindu Kush and the Muztagh-Karakoram ranges. Behind the latter with a general trend from south-east to north-west are the great valley of the Indus to the point near Gilgit where it turns sharply to the south, and a succession of mountain chains and glens making up the Himalayan tract, through which the five rivers of the Panjáb and the Jamna find their way to the plains. To meet trans-Indus extensions of the Himálaya the Hindu Kush pushes out from its main axis great spurs to the south, flanking the valleys which drain into the Indus either directly or through the Kábul river.

The Himálaya.—Tibet, which from the point of view of physical geography includes a large and little known area in the Kashmír State to the north of the Karakoram range, is a lofty, desolate, wind swept plateau with a mean elevation of about 15,000 feet. In the part of it situated to the north of the north-west corner of Nipál lies the Manasarowar lake, in the neighbourhood of which three great Indian rivers, the Tsanpo or Brahmapútra, the Sutlej, and the Indus, take their rise. The Indus flows to the north-west for 500 miles and then turns abruptly to the south to seek its distant home in the Indian Ocean. The Tsanpo has a still longer course of 800 miles eastwards before it too bends southwards to flow through Assam into the Bay of Bengal. Between the points where these two giant rivers change their direction there extends for a distance of 1500 miles the vast congeries of mountain ranges known collectively as the "Himálaya" or "Abode of Snow." As a matter of convenience the name is sometimes confined to the mountains east of the Indus, but geologically the hills of Buner and Swát to the north of Pesháwar probably belong to the same system. In Sanskrit literature the Himalaya is also known as "Himavata," whence the classical Emodus.

Fig. 2. Orographical Map.
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The Kumáon Himálaya.—The Himálaya may be divided longitudinally into three sections, the eastern or Sikkim, the mid or Kumáon, and the north-western or Ladákh. With the first we are not concerned. The Kumáon section lies mainly in the United Provinces, but it includes the sources of the Jamna, and contains the chain in the Panjáb which is at once the southern watershed of the Sutlej and the great divide between the two river systems of Northern India, the Gangetic draining into the Bay of Bengal, and the Indus carrying the enormous discharge of the north-west Himálaya, the Muztagh-Karakoram, and the Hindu Kush ranges into the Indian Ocean. Simla stands on the south-western end of this watershed, and below it the Himálaya drops rapidly to the Siwálik foot-hills and to the plains. Jakko, the deodár-clad hill round which so much of the life of the summer capital of India revolves, attains a height of 8000 feet. The highest peak within a radius of 25 miles of Simla is the Chor, which is over 12,000 feet high, and does not lose its snow cap till May. Hattu, the well-known hill above Narkanda, which is 40 miles from Simla by road, is 1000 feet lower. But further west in Bashahr the higher peaks range from 16,000 to 22,000 feet.

Fig. 3. Nanga Parvat.