The Geography of the Puranas c9.12

c9.12

In the above paragraph we have presumed that the Kizil-Su represents the headwaters of the Sitā river. There are strong reasons for this assumption. Firstly, the river is supposed to rise in the ‘northern peaks of Meru’. Secondly, it has a lake—Lake Arunoda—at its source and thirdly, it first of all ‘falls on the east of the Mandara mountain’ and thereafter on the Sitānta mountain and ‘obstructed by gardens further splits into several branches’. A topographical map of the Tarim basin will show that the Tarim river receives two main tributaries from the west, i.e., the Kashghar (or Kizil-Su) and the Yārkand. Of these two the former satisfies all the three conditions mentioned above. On the other hand the Yārkand, though bigger in volume, rises behind the Kunlun range (the Niṣadha of the Purāṇas) and not in the Pāmīrs (Meru). Besides, it never crosses the two longitudinal ranges which bound Meru on the east so explicitly mentioned in the Purāṇas. We are also not aware of any lake which feeds or may have fed the Yārkand river in the past.