“The Brahmins maintain,” says Cosmas Indicopleustes, in his Christian Topography[BZ], “that a line drawn from Tzinitza (Thinæ) across Persia and Romania, would exactly pass over the centre of the inhabited earth.” It is remarkable, as Eratosthenes observes, that this greatest axis of elevation in the old world passes directly through the basin (the depression) of the Mediterranean, in the parallels of 35½° and 36° north latitude, to the Pillars of Hercules.[CA] The most eastern portion of Hindoo-Coosh is the Paropanisus of the ancients, the Indian Caucasus of the companions of the great Macedonian. The name of _Hindoo-Coosh_, which is so frequently used by geographers, does not in reality apply to more than one single mountain pass, where the climate is so severe, as we learn from the travels of the Arabian writer, Ibn Batuta, that many Indian slaves frequently perish from the cold.[CB] The Kuen-lün still exhibits active fire-emitting eruptions at the distance of several hundred miles from the sea-coast. Flames, visible at a great distance, burst from the cavern of the mountain of Schinkhieu, as I learn from a translation of the Yuen-thong-ki, made by my friend Stanislaus Julien.[CC] The loftiest summit in the Hindoo-Coosh, north-west of Jellalabad, is 20,232 feet above the level of the sea; to the west, towards Herat, the chain sinks to 2558 feet, rising again north of Teheran, in the volcano of Demavend, to the height of 14,675 feet. 4. The mountain system of the Himalaya has a normal direction from east to west, running more than 15 degrees of longitude (from 81° to 97°), or from the colossal mountain Dhawalagiri (28,072 feet) to the intersection of the Dzangbo-tscheu (the Irawaddy of Dalrymple and Klaproth), whose existence was long regarded as problematical, and to the meridian chains, which cover the whole of Western China, and form the great mountain group, from which spring the sources of the Kiang, in the provinces of Sse-tschuan, Hu-kuang, and Kuang-si. Next to the Dhawalagiri, the Kinchinjinga, and not the more eastern peak of Schamalari, as has hitherto been supposed, is the highest point of this portion of the Himalaya, which inclines from east to west. The Kinchinjinga, in the meridian of Sikhim, between Butan and Nepal, between the Schamalari (23,980 feet) and the Dhawalagiri, is 28,174 feet in height.