The central and most elevated portion of this region is the province of Ngari--called by the people of the adjoining British territory _Hyundes_, or "Snowland." It embraces extensive desert tracts, intersected by several lofty ranges, the chief being that of Kylass, the sacred celestial mountain of Indian mythology. The table-land at the foot of Kylass, on which lie the twin lakes of Rákas Thal and Manasaráwur, at a height of 15,250 feet above the sea, is probably the most elevated in Asia, or in the world. On the shores of these sacred lakes occurred, some years ago, the catastrophe of a curious historical episode. Zorawur Singh, commanding the troops, of Goolab Singh of Jummoo, (now well known as the Lord of Kashmeer,) after overrunning Little Tibet and subjugating Ladakh, advanced up the Indus and beyond it, till he had occupied posts on the frontier of the Nepalese Himalayas, as if he meditated a foray on the Grand Lama's capital at last. But it proved a Moscow expedition on a small scale. His troops, unused to such a climate, and straitened for fuel, were beset in the depth of winter by a superior force from Lhassa, and, helpless from cold, were overpowered: their leader was slain, their officers captured, and the mass perished in heaps miserably. A few poor, frost-maimed wretches--the sole relics of Zorawur Singh's adventurous band--brought the tale to the British station at Almora, having fled across passes 16,000 feet high in mid-winter. The bleak aspect of the Tibetan plain, as seen from the pass of Niti, somewhat westward of the lakes--shrubless, treeless, houseless--is compared by a traveller to the dreary moors of Upper Clydesdale, with stone and scanty brown herbage in the place of heather. Some of the most celebrated rivers in the world have their not unworthy source in the lofty table which forms the base of the Hindoo Olympus. The Ganges rises in the mountains immediately adjoining Ngari on the south-west, the Gogra, which, were size alone to decide the rights of river nomenclature, might perhaps claim the Ganges as a tributary, has its source in Ngari; so have the Indus, the Sutlej, and the Sanpoo. The Sanpoo, after flowing eastward behind the Himalayan range for some eight hundred miles, is lost to geography in the untraversed regions south-east of Lhassa. In the last century, D'Anville identified the Sanpoo with the Irawaddy, flowing through the whole extent of the Burman Empire to the sea at Rangoon; but the sagacity of Rennel suggested that the Burrampooter, emerging from unexplored mountains into the valley of Assam, and bearing to the sea a flood of waters greatly exceeding the Ganges, is the true Sanpoo. Turner, who, in his mission, reached the banks of the Sanpoo, indicates its course from the information of the Lamas in entire coincidence with Rennel's view.[11] In later years, however, Klaproth has revived the theory of D'Anville, apparently without good grounds. The Dihong, which is the principal contributor