ii THE BIEDS OF MANIPUR, 



Logtag in Manipur, and these are, strange to say, the only 

 two such lakes in the length and breadth of the British 

 Asian Empire outside the Himalayas. In the Himalayas 

 we have, of course, the Woollar Lake in Cashmere, and the 

 Tsomourari and Pangong (both salt, and at an elevation of 

 14,000 to 15,000 feet), and out of the Himalayas we have south 

 of Cuttack on the east coast of India, the Chilka Lake ; but 

 this is really a mere backwater, the entrance to which from 

 the sea has nearly silted up, and it is always brackish, and 

 at times very salt. There are a good many largish broads 

 in some parts of the country, of which the Najjafgarh jheel, 

 south of Delhi, is the most notable example, and an almost 

 equal number, in other parts of the country, of artificial 

 pieces of water, of which the Deba and Kunkrowli Lakes of 

 Oodeypore are the finest specimens ; but the Maijchur and the 

 Logtag are the only large natural fresh-water lakes that I 

 know of in the Empire south of the Himalayas. Then again' 

 the western portions of both consist of ranges of hills from 

 5,000 to 7,000 feet in altitude. 



But, of course, though on the same parallel of latitude, and 

 each boasting a huge fresh-water lake and a similarly placed 

 range of equally high hills, the conditions of Sindh and 

 Manipur differ in other respects widely. Sindh abuts upon 

 the sea everywhere along its somewhat narrow southern 

 boundary ; Manipur is entirely land-locked, though the north- 

 east angle of the Bay of Bengal runs up to within little 

 more than 200 miles of its south-western point. Sindh is 

 for the most part a low alluvial plain, the delta of the Indusj 

 but little raised above sea level, though its extreme western 

 portions rise into hills, some of which do not fall short of 6,000 

 or 7,000 feet. Of Manipur the more important portion is the 

 bed or beds of a vast ancient lake, or possibly a series of thesej 

 having an average elevation of, say, some 2,000 feet above 

 sea level, surrounded on all sides, and not on the west only, by 

 hills rising to an elevation of 5,000 to 7,000 feet, and towards 

 the extreme north, to which my explorations did not extend, 

 I am told, from 10,000 to 12,000 feet. Moreover-r-and this is, to 

 my notion, the fundamental difference — Sindh is a country of 

 minimum rainfall ; it is almost rainless ; sometimes, in the hills, 

 there does not fall a drop of rain for nearly two years ; the agri- 

 cdlture of the province is almost as dependant on the rise of the 

 Indus as that of Egypt is on the swelling of the Nile, and 

 the hills, which of course benefit in no appreciable degree from 

 the floods of the great river far away below, are, as a rule> 

 about as barren, bare and sun-burnt a congeries of rugged 

 rocks as one could meet with. Manipur is a country of 

 heavy rainfall, varying probably in different parts of hills 



