Not far from the sources of the Indus, at the very nucleus of the highest summits of the Himalayas, rise the Yamuna (Jumna) and the Ganges. The Ganges flows out of fields of snow beneath unsurmountable summits of more than 20,000 feet in height, and breaking through the mountains to the south reaches the plains; here the course of the river is turned to the east by the broad and thickly-wooded girdle of the Vindhyas, the mountain range which rises to the south of the plains. Enlarged by a number of tributaries from north and south, it pours from year to year copious inundations over the low banks, and thus creates for the plains through which it flows a fruitful soil where tropic vegetation can flourish in the most luxuriant wildness. This is the land of rice, of cotton, of sugar-canes, of the blue lotus, the edible banana, the gigantic fig-tree. On the lower course of the river, where it approaches the Brahmaputra, which also at first flows between the parallel ranges of the Himalayas towards the east, in the same way as the Indus flows to the west, there commences a hot, moist, and luxuriant plain (Bengal) of enervating climate, covered with coco and arica palms, with the tendrils of the betel, and the stalks of the cinnamon, with endless creepers overgrowing the trunks of the trees, and ascending even to their topmost branches. Here the river is so broad that the eye can no longer reach from one bank to the other. In the region at the mouth, where the Ganges unites with the Brahmaputra, and then splits into many arms, the numerous waters create hot marshes; and here the vegetation is so abundant, the jungles of bamboo so thick and impenetrable, that they are abandoned to the rhinoceros, the elephant, and the tiger, whose proper home is in these wooded morasses.