1859.] The Flooding of the Indus. 205 



as if the snow-supply had been cut off. This I think as improbable 

 as the other circumstances narrated ; and to illustrate the probabi- 

 lity of their being exaggerated into falsity, I may mention the facts 

 with regard to another phenomenon universally insisted on. — All 

 accounts of the flood of 1841 particularize the wave or wall which 

 swept down the channel of the river, and the noise occasioned by it, 

 which was the first harbinger of the approaching destruction. Some 

 of my informants gravely talked of this wave as 50 or 60 feet high, 

 and of the roar being heard while the water was still a considerable 

 distance behind. In Col. Abbott's notes on the matter, these points 

 are prominent, and it is added that in front of the great wave was a 

 moving mass of carcases, trees, and other matter, swept on by the 

 power of the water. 



On this last occasion I was myself on the river in a row boat, 

 which a wave one foot high would doubtless have swamped, but 

 wave there was none, nor noise either, nor any appearance of car- 

 cases or anything of the kind. The river commenced rising 

 quickly, but step by step, nor until it had attained a considerable 

 height was there any sign of drift-wood, field -produce, or other 

 floating material. 



I made fresh enquiries into the circumstances observed on the 

 previous occasion, and then discovered that there was living till 

 1857 an old boatman called Lutchoo, who it was well known to all 

 the men had been sitting on his boat in the middle of the bridge at 

 the time the flood occurred, and had managed to float away upon it 

 and ultimately to come safe to land in the mouth of the Herrot. 

 I do not deny that this was a very remarkable escape, nor do I 

 doubt that one dam might give way in a more gradual mode than 

 another, but 1 feel convinced that a three feet wave would have 

 swamped every one of the old Attok boats, and looking to the ordi- 

 nary action of running water, am certainly inclined to believe that 

 the flood came down in 18-11 much as it did in 1858 ; and that the 

 wave, the roaring, and the mass of dead bodies, are all fictions to- 

 gether, and in the same way I think that the diminution of water 

 in 1811 has been invented or exaggerated, and that if any such took 

 place it was not owing to the obstruction at all ; for on the one hand 

 the stoppage of the main stream of the Indus, at any point where il 



