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lower close to its surface than at a distance on the surroundingarid plains. The Indus supplies a precious store of waterfor irrigation works at various points along its course, andforms the great highway of the Southern Punjab and Sind.
In its lower course it sends forth distributaries across a widedelta, with Haidarabad in Sind as its ancient political capital,and Karachi as its modern port. The silt which it carriesdown has helped to form the seaboard islands, mud-banks, andshallows, that have cut off the famous emporia of ancienttrade around the Gulf of Cambay from modern commerce.
The Brahmaputra , like the Sutlej , rises near to the sacred The Tsan-lake of Manasarowar. Indeed, the Indus , the Sutlej , and j^hma-the Brahmaputra may be said to start from the same water- putra.parting in the highlands of Central Asia . The Indus rises onthe western slope of the Kailas mountain, the Sutlej on itssouthern, and the Brahmaputra at some distance from itseastern base. The Mariam-la and other saddles connect the The Kailasmore northern Tibetan mountains, to which the Kailas be watershecl -longs, with the double Himalayan wall on the south. Theyform an irregular watershed across the trough on the north ofthe double wall of the Himalayas ; thus, as it were, blockingup the western half of the great Central Asian trench. TheIndus flows down a western valley from this transverse water-shed ; the Sutlej finds a more direct route to India by asouth-western valley. The Brahmaputra , under its Tibetan name of Tsan-pu or Sangpu, has its source in 31 0 n. lat. and83° e. long. It flows eastward down the Tsan-pu valley,passing not very far to the south of Lhasa, the capital ofTibet ; and probably 800 to 900 miles, or about one-half ofits total course, are spent in the hollow trough on the north ofthe Himalayas . This brief account assumes that the Brahma putra of India is the true continuation of the Sangpu of Tibet .
The results of the latest researches into that long mootedquestion are given under article Brahmaputra 1 in my ImperialGazetteer of India.
After receiving several tributaries from the confines of the TheChinese Empire, the river twists round a lofty eastern range of Brahma-the Himalayas , and enters British territory under the name of fluents in'the Dihang , 1 near Sadiya in Assam . It presently receives Assam ,two confluents, the Dibang 1 river from the northward, andthe Brahmaputra proper from the east (lat. 27 0 20' n., long.
1 The use of small capitals in the case of proper names indicates that thesubject is treated at length in The Imperial Gazetteei' of 1 ndia i s.v.