224 
TIBET. 
The valley of Jhansu, which is very extensive, has greatly ,the 
appearance of having been once the bed of a lake. We descended a 
high bank, and found the level surface covered with coarse greyish 
sand and round stones, and intersected by the channels of many 
water-courses. This conjecture therefore instantly occurred; and the 
testimony of all whom I afterwards conversed with tended to give 
weight to it. But they could by no means fix the period of its being 
drained: the change was too remote to remain impressed upon the 
minds of those who now inhabit the neighbourhood; and I could obtain 
no determinate information, whether the discharge of the water was 
owing to art or nature. 
The Tibetians, like their neighbours, possessed of an ardent spirit 
of devotion, do not hesitate to attribute the merit of every thing great, 
or singularly beneficial, to the agency of some supernatural being. As 
no records exist, to immortalize the author of a work eminently inge¬ 
nious and useful, the lapse of many years is not necessary to involve 
the memory in complete oblivion; and the credit of it soon helps to 
aggrandize the importance of some fictitious deity. 
It is asserted that Tibet, in remote times, was almost totally inun¬ 
dated ; and the removal of the waters that covered its surface, is im¬ 
puted to the miraculous interposition of some object of their worship, 
whose chief temple is reported to be at Durgeedin, Gya. He, it is 
said, in compassion to the few inhabitants which Tibet contained, who 
<T 
in that age w 7 ere little better than monkeys, drew off the waters through 
Bengal, and, by sending teachers among them, humanized the wretched 
race, who w r ere subsequently to people it. In this belief of the Tibetians, 
