KASHMIR AND THE HIMALAYAS 117

forest country usually known as Tarai. Southwards it consists
 usually of a dense jungle of grass and immense forest
trees, and is impassable to all but elephants, rhinoceros,
and buffaloes. Such are the Bhutan Duars north of the
Brahmaputra River. Towards the north-west the character
of the vegetation alters with the changing climate, but the
Tarai jungle is still a marked feature dividing the hills
from the plains, notorious for its deadly climate during
certain seasons of the year, and famous as a game preserve.
The Tarai ends on the north-west where the subsidiary
range called Siwaliks begins, the formation of high level
valleys between the Siwaliks and the Himalaya offering
 a varied geographical feature, partaking of many
of the characteristics of Tarai both in climate and vegetation,

The physical conformation of the Himalayas as a whole
is not so complicated as a first view of the intricate maze
of mountain ranges on the map would seem to indicate.
The general high level upheaval above the earth’s surface
which crosses Asia from the Pamirs to the Burmese and
Chinese frontier is all mountainous, but not all mountainous
 in the same degree. That apparent water-parting,
which extends with more or less regularity from Kashmir
to Eastern Assam and Burma, which is set back from the
plains at about one hundred miles distance, and is distinguished
 as the “snowy range,” divides this vast elevated
region laterally into two systems with different characteristics.
 Northward of it, and beyond it, lies the true
source of all the chief rivers in India (the central snowy
range being no true divide or watershed), and in this
northern section it would seem that in the course of
countless ages the influence of glacial action had changed
the relative altitude of hill and plain, the mountain crests
becoming lower and the valleys more elevated and consequently
 more extensive. Thus we find wide plateaux in
Tibet intersected by rugged lines of mountains which have
no analogy whatever to the southern subsidiary ranges of
the Himalayas. The grassy highland valleys of the Pamirs
and the vast sterile stony steppes of Tibet are equally