ABSTRACT
All that I or anyone knew of the River Salween was that it was somewhere to the north of me, but I didn't know in which direction, whether south or south-east, it flowed. The accepted theory is that the Himalayan range was turned south-west at the Tsangpo bend, through coming in contact with the far older rocks of Western China, which run north and south, and that on these the Himalayan earth movements made no impression. From observations made on my earlier journeys, I had begun to suspect that this theory required modification; that in fact the Himalayan convulsion had made an impression on the pre-existing rock, elevating a snow range west and east, at right angles to the apparent north-south alignments. I thought that the orography of the gorge country had been studied too much from river courses, and too little from the alignment of mountain peaks, and that on examination these rivers would be found to have cut courses right through the real mountain ranges, instead of running parallel to them. Owing to the number of rivers piercing this range close together, the appearance has been superimposed that there are many ranges running north-south, instead of one long range running west and east; that is, the true breadth of one range has falsely been regarded as the lengths of several ranges, each river divide being regarded as a separate range. I was led to this surmise partly by the fact that all the snow peaks that I have seen during the last eighteen years, when plotted on a map, lie in a belt running north-west to south-east. The breadth of this belt nowhere exceeds seventy-five miles. Thus I did not regard the river divides as separate north-and-south ranges, but as isolated strips of one west-and-east range. Where the Tsangpo bends south, it passes through a deep gorge, as it would if it were cutting its way through a range. I hoped now to discover whether the Salween did the same.
