574 Lieutenant Burnes’ Memoir on the 
Water, it is known, forces itself easily into a tract where there is a 
channel for it to run, and having established the course of these three 
rivers, we can believe that as a greater column of rain-water flowing down 
them would widen the channel, so would a greater influx of sea-water forcing 
itself up them, readily overflow the low tract which bordered on them. The 
junction of such a body of water from the east and the west, or from the 
Indus and Luni on one side, and Bannass on the other, would speedily form an 
inland lake or sea, such as the present Runn has, in my opinion, been. But 
the earthquake of 1819 was attended with circumstances, which would super- 
sede the necessity of making these rivers overflow their banks. It made 
numerous fissures in the Runn in different places, and I have it from the 
most undoubted authority of eye-witnesses, that immense quantities of black 
muddy water were ejected from these openings for a period of three days, 
that the water bubbled out of the wells of the Banmi, till it overwhelmed 
the country in some places with six, seven, and even ten feet of water, and 
that the shepherds with difficulty saved themselves and their flocks. If 
in our own times such an extraordinary increase of water has taken place on 
the Runn, it renders my view of the subject, as being only a recurrence of 
former events not very improbable. 
The natives, however, carry their traditions of the Runn having been 
navigable into greater minuteness than a vague account of ships having 
navigated it, and point out to this day the positions of the different harbours 
on its banks. Nerond, a village twenty miles N.N.W. of Bhij, and near 
the Runn, is said to have been a sea-port. In the poesy of the country 
it is described in these words—“ Nerona naggartir, jadhi Guntri Chitrano,” 
or, in other words, that Nerond was a town and a sea-port (di) when Guntvi, 
the ancient capital of Cutch, flourished in the Chitrdno, an inland district so 
called.* At Chari, a small village ten miles distant from Guutri, and situ. 
ated on a river, there are traditions also of a harbour. The Pacham people 
have similar traditions of like places, and of boats being wrecked on the hills 
of that island; also that there was a considerable harbour near them, called 
Dérat Doh or Déht, the site of which I have ascertained to be on the 
northern side of the Banni, westward of Caord, and not far from a place 
* See note N. 
