Note 681 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

A river system is a system of communication. It therefore makes a bond of union between the people living among its remoter sources and those settled at its mouth. Every such river system forms geographically an unbroken whole. Only where a wild, torrent-filled gorge, like the Brahmaputra's path through the Himalayas, interrupts communication between the upper and lower course, is human life in the two sections divorced. But such cases are rare. Even the River Jhelam, which springs with mad bounds from the lofty Vale of Kashmir through the outer range of the Himalayas down to its junction with the Indus, carries quantities of small logs to be used as railway sleepers; and though it shatters a large per cent. of them, it makes a link between the lumber men of the Kashmir forests and British railroad engineers in the treeless plains of the Indus.681