Page:Provincial geographies of India (Volume 1).djvu/59

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RIVERS
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bridge crossing it in the Panjab. Elsewhere the passage has to be made by ferry boats or by boat bridges, which are taken down in the rainy season. At Kalabagh the height above sea level is less than iooo feet. When it passes the western extremity of the Salt Range the river spreads out into a wide lake-like expanse of waters. It has now performed quite half of its long journey. Henceforth it receives no addition from the east till the Panjnad in the south-west corner of the Muzaffargarh district brings to it the whole tribute of the five rivers of the Panjab. Here, though the Indian ocean is still 500 miles distant, the channel is less than 300 feet above the sea. From the west it receives an important tributary in the Kurram, which, with its affluent the Tochi, rises in Afghanistan. The torrents from the Suliman Range are mostly used up for irrigation before they reach the Indus, but some of them mingle their waters with it in high floods Below Kalabagh the Indus is a typical lowland river of great size, with many sandy islands in the bed and a wide valley subject to its inundations. Opposite Dera Ismail Khan the valley is seventeen miles across. As a plains river the Indus runs at first through the Mianwali district of the Panjab, then divides Mianwali from Dera Ismail Khan, and lastly parts Muzaffargarh and the Bahawalpur State from the Panjab frontier district of Dera Ghazi Khan.

The Jhelam.— The Jhelam, the most westernly of the five rivers of the Panjab, is called the Veth in Kashmir and locally in the Panjab plains the Vehat. These names correspond to the Bihat of the Muhammadan historians and the Hydaspes of the Greeks, and all go back to the Sanskrit Vitasta. Issuing from a deep pool at Vernag to the east of Islamabad in Kashmir it becomes navigable just below that town, and flows north-west in a lazy stream for 102 miles through Srinagar, the summer