hannel, 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 Panjab 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 Panjab
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
Rawalpindi, proceeds by tonga to the capital of Kashmir, he will find
between Kohala and Baramula 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 Baramula is an exception, flowing there sluggishly through a very
flat valley into a shallow lake.