Vedic India as embodied principally in the Rig-Veda / [Zénaïde A. Ragozin].

  • Ragozin, Zénaïde A. (Zénaïde Alexeïevna), 1835-1924.
Date:
[1895]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vedic India as embodied principally in the Rig-Veda / [Zénaïde A. Ragozin]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    9. A bird’s-eye view, embracing the whole of Dek- han, would show it to be a roughly outlined triangu- lar table-land, raised from one to three thousand feet above the sea on three massive buttresses of which the broad Vindhya ridge is one, covering the base of the reversed triangle, while the sides are represented by two chains of unequal height, respectively named Western and Eastern Ghats. This name, mean- ing “ landing stairs,” is particularly appropriate to the western chain, which rises in serrated and pre- cipitous rocky steeps almost from the very sea, only in places receding from the shore sufficiently to leave a narrow strip of cultivable and habitable land. On such a strip the wealthy and magnificent city of Bombay is built, very much like the Phoenician cities of yore, the Ghats stretching their protecting wall behind them just as the Lebanon did behind Tyre and Sidon, the sea-queens of Canaan. Like the Lebanon, too, they slope inland, directing the course of all the rivers of Dekhan from west to east. In scenery they are much sterner and grander than the Vindhya range, which they, moreover, surpass in elevation, their average height being uniformly about 3000 feet along the coast, with abrupt peaks reaching 4700 feet, and nearly the double of that in the considerably upheaved southern angle of the peninsula, where they form a sort of knot, joining the southern extremity of the Eastern Ghats. This latter range is really not a continuous mountain chain at all, but rather a series of inconsiderable spurs and hills, interrupted at frequent intervals by broad gaps, through which the rivers, fed by the