giant peaks which rise up to almost 30,000 feet; but, as I have already hinted, there is even more meaning. than this, and more propriety than the Arabs themselves understood, in their phrase, "The Stony Girdle of the Earth," because this great central range can easily be traced from the mountains of Formosa in the China Sea to the Pyrenees, where they sink into the Mediterranean. This fact has not escaped the notice of geographers; and Dr Mackay, especially, has drawn attention to it in his admirable Manual of Modern Geography,' (Edin. 1871) though he has not known the expressive phrase of his Arab predecessors. The Western Himálaya are a series of nearly parallel ranges lying from south-east to north-west. They are properly the Central Himálaya; the Hindú Kúsh are the Western; and what are now called the Central Himalaya are the Eastern. These are the most obvious great natural divisions; but additional confusion is caused by the Inner Himalaya, or the interior ranges, being also sometimes spoken of as the Central. It is more usual, however, to take the Pamir Steppe, or "the Roof of the World," as a centre, and to speak of the western range as a boundary wall to the high table land of Western Asia, separating the waters of the Arabian Gulf from those of the Caspian, the Black Sea, and the Aral. That portion consists of the Hindú Kúsh, the Parapomisan mountains, the Elburz, the Zagros of Kurdistan, Ararat and the Armenian mountains, the Taurus and Anti-Taurus; and these are continued through Europe in the mountains of Greece and European Turkey, the Alps, the Cevennes, and the Pyrenees. The south-eastern range runs from the Pamir to the China Sea, in the Himalaya, and in the branches from it which go down into the Malay Peninsula and Annam. The eastern range goes nearly due east from the Pamir to the Pacific in the Kuen-lung, and in the Pe-ling, which separate the Yang-tsze from the Yellow River. There is also a north-east range, which runs from the Pamir to Behring's Strait, including the Tengu Tagh, and several ranges in Siberia and Kamtchatka. But the Himalaya proper, with which we are concerned, may be said to be enclosed by the Indus, the Brahmapútra, and the great northern plain of India. That is a very simple and intelligible boundary line; for the two rivers rise close together in, or in the near neighbourhood of, Lake Mansoráwar; in the first part of their course they flow close behind the great ranges of the Himalaya, and they cut through the mountains at points where there is some reason for considering that new ranges commence. In adopting "The Abode of Snow" as the running title of these papers, I only gave the literal meaning of the word Himalaya, which is a Sanscrit word, and is to be found in most of the languages of India. It is a compound word, composed of hima, snow or winter, and alaya, an abode or place. Its component parts are thus Hima-alaya; and as the double a is contracted into one, even the infant philologist of modern times will perceive the erroneousness of our ordinary English way of pronouncing the word as Himalaya."* The Sanscrit word hima is also some We are not quite so bad as the French in this respect; but, as a general rule, the infant philologist (and all infants are in a fair way of being philologists nowadays) will find it pretty safe always to reverse the acents which he finds Englishmen putting upon foreign names. Even such a simple and obvious word as Brindisi we must turn into Brindisi ; and it is still worse when we come to give names of our own to localities. times used to signify the moon and a pearl; but even thus a portion of its original meaning is denoted. No doubt this hima is closely cognate with the Latin hiems and hibernus, for himermus; with the Greek xúv (xeîua), the Persico-Zend zim and zima, and the Slavonic zima, a word used for winter. As the great Abode of the Gods is held by the Hindús to be in the Himalaya, and the word Himálaya itself is used by them in that sense, it is obvious that Himmel, the German word for heaven, comes from the same source; and it is the only instance I know of in European languages which takes in both compounds. This must surely have occurred to the lexicographers, but I have not noticed any reference to it. It also occurs to me that the word "Imaus," which Milton uses in the third book of Paradise Lost,' and which he took from Pliny, may very likely be from himas, another Sanscrit form used for winter and for the Himálaya. In Hindú mythology these mountains are personified as the husband of Manaka. He was also the father of Dúrga, the great goddess of destruction, who became What a descent from "The Abode of Snow" to "The Hills" of the AngloIndians, even when the latter phrase may come from a rosebud mouth! But that is not so striking an example of our national taste as one which has occurred in Jamaica, where a valley which used to be called by the Spaniards the "Bocaguas," or "Mouth of the Waters," has been transmuted by us into "Bog Walks." A still more curious transmutation, though of a reverse order, occurred in Hong-Kong, in the early days of that so-called colony. There was a street there, much frequented by sailors, in which Chinese damsels used to sit at the windows and greet the passers-by with the invitation, "Come 'long, Jack;" consequently the street became known by the name of the "Come 'long Street," which in the Chinese mouth was Kum Lúng, or "The Golden Dragon." So when the streets were named and placarded, "Come 'long Street" appeared, both in Chinese and English, as the Street of the Golden Dragon. 66 incarnate as Parvati, or the "daughter of the mountain," in order to captivate Síva and withdraw him from a penance which he had undertaken to perform in the Himalaya. Síva himself also is known as Himálaya, and it is under that title that he forms the subject of Kálidása's beautiful poem the "Kumara Sambhana," or Birth of the War-God," which has been admirably rendered in English verse by Mr R. T. H. Griffith (London, 1853). It is, then, with the god of destruction and his no less terrible spouse, that the Himalaya are more specially associated, rather than with the brighter form of Vishnu, the Preserver; but the whole Hindú, pantheon are also regarded as dwelling among the inaccessible snowy peaks of these inaccessible mountains. Neither Cretan Ida nor Thessalian Olympus can boast of such a company; and, looking up to the snows of the Kailas, it may well be said that 66 Every legend fair, Which the supreme Caucasian mind Being a boundary wall to the Tibetan and other elevated plains of Central Asia, the Himálaya are usually steep towards the Indian side, and more gradual towards the north, the strata dipping to the north-east; but this rule has many exceptions, as in the case of the Kailas and the lofty mountains forming the southern boundary of the Shigri valley. There the fall is as abrupt as it could well be towards the north, and the 23,000-feet Akun peaks in Súrú seem to stand up like needles. The statement frequently made that there is more soil and more springs on the northern than on the southern side, applies specially only to that portion of the exterior range which runs from the Narkanda Ghaut up to the Kailas. The height of the snow-line in the Himalaya presents the remarkable peculiarity of being lower on its southern slope than on its northern. The chief cause of this is the dryness of the northern side and the great quantity of snow deposited on the southern side by the moisture of the Indian monsoon. According to the Schlagintweits, though the southern slope from Bhotan to Kashmír has an average temperature of 33° F., its snow-line is at 16,200 feet; while on the southern slope, with a temperature at 25°, it is at 18,600 feet. On the eastern slope of the Andes of Bolivia the snowline is 15,900 feet, but on their western slope 18,500. On the Alps the line is 9100 feet on the north side, and 9100 feet on the south. General Cunningham assigns a somewhat higher line for the higher Himalaya, and it is at least so high as to detract greatly from their beauty in July and August, though that increases their savage grandeur. Even taking 16,200 feet and 18,600 feet as the line of perpetual snow on these mountains, that really only means that we find exposed surfaces of rock at these heights, and must not be taken as a literal rule. Where snow can lodge it is rare to find bare tracts above 16,000 feet at any period of the year; and even in August a snowstorm may cover everything down to 10,000 feet, or even lower. There are great beds of snow and glaciers which remain unremoved during the summer, and on the north side, far below 18,000 feet. In the Swiss Alps the line of perpetual snow is about 9000 feet; so there is the enormous difference on this point of 9000 feet between the two mountain-ranges; and so it may be conceived |