The general height of the plains north of the Salt Range is from 1000 feet to 2000 feet above sea level. The rise between Lahore and Ráwalpindí is just over a thousand feet. Low hills usually form a feature of the landscape, pleasing at a distance or when softened by the evening light, but bare and jagged on a nearer view. The chief hills are the Márgalla range between Hazára and Ráwalpindí, the Kálachitta and the Khairimurat hills running east and west through Attock and the very dry and broken Narrara hills on the right bank of the Indus in the same district. Between the Márgalla and Kálachitta hills is the Márgalla pass on the main road from Ráwalpindí to the passage of the Indus at Attock, and therefore a position of considerable strategical importance. The Kálachitta (black and white) chain is so called because the north side is formed of nummulitic limestone and the south mainly of a dark purple sandstone. The best tree-growth is therefore on the north side.
Pesháwar, Kohát, and Bannu.—Across the Indus the Pesháwar and Bannu districts are basins ringed with hills and drained respectively by the Kábul and Kurram rivers with their affluents. Between these two basins lies the maze of bare broken hills and valleys which make up the Kohát district. The cantonment of Kohát is 1700 feet above sea level and no hill in the district reaches 5000 feet. Near the Kohát border in the south-west of the Pesháwar district are the Khattak hills, the culmination of which at Ghaibana Sir has a height of 5136 feet, and the military sanitarium of Cherát in the same chain is 600 feet lower. On the east the Maidáni hills part Bannu from Isakhel, the trans-Indus tahsíl of Mianwáli, and on the south the Marwat hills divide it from Dera Ismail Khán. Both are humble ranges. The highest point in the Marwat hills is Shekhbudín, a bare and dry limestone rock rising to an elevation of over 4500 feet.
CHAPTER III
RIVERS
The Panjáb Rivers.—"Panjáb" is a Persian compound word, meaning "five waters," and strictly speaking the word denotes the country between the valley of the Jhelam and that of the Sutlej. The intermediate rivers from west to east are the Chenáb, the Ráví, and the Biás. Their combined waters at last flow into the Panjnad or "five rivers" at the south-west corner of the Multán district, and the volume of water which 44 miles lower down the Panjnad carries into the Indus is equal to the discharge of the latter. The first Aryan settlers knew this part of India as the land of the seven rivers (sapla sindhavas), adding to the five mentioned above the Indus and the Sarasvatí. The old Vedic name is more appropriate than Panjáb if we substitute the Jamna for the Sarasvatí or Sarustí, which is now a petty stream.
River Valleys.—The cold weather traveller who is carried from Delhi to Ráwalpindí over the great railway bridges at points chosen because there the waters of the rivers are confined by nature, or can be confined by art, within moderate limits, has little idea of what one of these rivers is like in flood time. He sees that, even at such favoured spots, between the low banks there is a stretch of sand far exceeding in width the main channel, where a considerable volume of water is running, and the minor depressions, in which a sluggish and shallow flow may still be found. If, leaving the railway, he crosses a river by some bridge of boats or local ferry, he will find still wider expanses of sand sometimes bare and dry and white, at others moist and dark and covered with dwarf tamarisk. He may notice that, before he reaches the sand and the tamarisk scrub, he leaves by a gentle or abrupt descent the dry uplands, and passes into a lower, greener, and perhaps to his inexperienced eye more fertile seeming tract. This is the valley, often miles broad, through which the stream has moved in ever-shifting channels in the course of centuries. He finds it hard to realize that, when the summer heats melt the Himalayan snows, and the monsoon currents, striking against the northern mountain walls, are precipitated in torrents of rain, the rush of water to the plains swells the river 20, 30, 40, or even 50 fold. The sandy bed then becomes full from bank to bank, and the silt laden waters spill over into the cultivated lowlands beyond. Accustomed to the stable streams of his own land, he cannot conceive the risks the riverside farmer in the Panjáb runs of having fruitful fields smothered in a night with barren sand, or lands and well and house sucked into the river-bed. So great and sudden are the changes, bad and good, wrought by river action that the loss and gain have to be measured up year by year for revenue purposes. Nor is the visitor likely to imagine that the main channel may in a few seasons become a quite subsidiary or wholly deserted bed. Like all streams, e.g. the Po, which flow from the mountains into a flat terrain, the Panjáb rivers are perpetually silting up their beds, and thus, by their own action, becoming diverted into new channels or into existing minor ones, which are scoured out afresh. If our traveller, leaving the railway at Ráwalpindi, proceeds by tonga to the capital of Kashmír, he will find between Kohála and Báramúla another surprise awaiting him. The noble but sluggish river of the lowlands, which he crossed at the town of Jhelam, is here a swift and deep torrent, flowing over a boulder bed, and swirling round waterworn rocks in a gorge hemmed in by mountains. That is the typical state of the Himalayan rivers, though the same Jhelam above Báramúla is an exception, flowing there sluggishly through a very flat valley into a shallow lake.
The Indus Basin.—The river Sindh (Sanskrit, Sindhu), more familiar to us under its classical name of the Indus, must have filled with astonishment every invader from the west, and it is not wonderful that they called after it the country that lay beyond. Its basin covers an area of 373,000 square miles. Confining attention to Asia these figures, large though they seem, are far exceeded by those of the Yangtsze-Kiang. The area of which a description is attempted in this book is, with the exception of a strip along the Jamna and the part of Kashmír lying beyond the Muztagh-Karakoram range, all included in the Indus basin. But it does not embrace the whole of it. Part is in Tibet, part in Afghánistán and Biluchistán, and part in Sindh, through which province the Indus flows for 450 miles, or one-quarter of its whole course of 1800 miles. It seems likely that the Jamna valley was not always an exception, or at least that that river once flowed westwards through Rájputána to the Indian ocean. The five great rivers of the Panjáb all drain into the Indus, and the Ghagar with its tributary, the Sarustí, which now, even when in flood, loses itself in the sands of Bikaner, probably once flowed down the old Hakra bed in Baháwalpur either into the Indus or by an independent bed now represented by an old flood channel of the Indus in Sindh, the Hakro or Nara, which passes through the Rann of Kachh.
The Indus outside British India.—To the north of the Manasarowar lake in Tibet is Kailás, the Hindu Olympus. On the side of this mountain the Indus is said to rise at a height of 17,000 feet. After a course of 200 miles or more it crosses the south-east boundary of the Kashmír State at an elevation of 13,800 feet. From the Kashmír frontier to Mt. Haramosh west of Gilgit it flows steadily to the north-west for 350 miles. After 125 miles Leh, the capital of Ladákh, is reached at a height of 10,500 feet, and here the river is crossed by the trade route to Yarkand. A little below Leh the Indus receives the Zánskar, which drains the south-east of Kashmír. After another 150 miles it flows through the basin, in which Skardo, the principal town in Baltistán, is situated. Above Skardo a large tributary, the Shyok, flows in from the east at an elevation of 8000 feet. The Shyok and its affluent, the Nubra, rise in the giant glaciers to the south-west of the Karakoram pass. After the Skardo basin is left behind the descent is rapid. The river rushes down a tremendous gorge, where it appears to break through the western Himálaya, skirts Haramosh, and at a point twenty-five miles east of Gilgit bends abruptly to the south. Shortly after it is joined from the west by the Gilgit river, and here the bed is about 4000 feet above sea level. Continuing to flow south for another twenty miles it resumes its westernly course to the north of Nanga Parvat and persists in it for 100 miles. Our political post of Chilás lies in this section on the south bank. Fifty or sixty miles west of Chilás the Indus turns finally to