22 THiM INT£DIAN EIMPIRE [CHAP.
warks which they afford for frontier defence; the future of
India depends on the manner in which we maintain those
defences, guarding the gateways and portals of the hills,
and preventing those landward irruptions which have so often
changed her dynasties and given a new ethnographic strain
to her people.
The Indo- The Peninsula of India is parted from the northern area
Gangetic of upheaval, of which the Himalayas are the southern revetment,
sion. by a broad interval of low flat country known as the Indo-
Gangetic depression. In some respects this is the most
important physical feature of India. Within the basin of the
Ganges have ever been founded the chief kingdoms of the.
plains; the most ancient cities; the earliest centres of civil-
ization, of industry, and of wealth. The mighty river has
silently worked through the ages in an unceasing process of
regeneration of the soil, spreading life and strength abroad
among the millions who venerate its sanctifying agency and
purify themselves from sin in the turbid flood which laps the
temple steps of HardwAr and Benares. From the delta of
the Ganges to the delta of the Indus this strange wide region
of depression extends. Within it is not to be found a boulder
(not even a pebble) to break the uniform regularity of its
alluvial surface. It is these heat-stricken plains, rather than
the mountains of the north or the plateaux of the south,
which have given India its colouring in history, and from which
was derived the popular conception of the India of last
century. Since the geological era in which occurred the
parting of the waters, when the Indus affluents first started
westwards and those of the Ganges turned their currents
to the east, the physical character of the two basins has
rapidly diverged.
All of the Gangetic basin is within the influence of
the south-west monsoon rains; and the thick humid
atmosphere of steamy effervescence, which is the charac-
teristic of Lower Bengal and of those provinces to the
south which are watered by the Mahanadi, makes all the
land green with the luxuriance of vegetation. From the
extreme north-western extension of the East Indian rail-
way system to the delta of the Ganges and Calcutta, the
traveller passes through nothing but a wide area of crop-
producing land, broken by clustering groves of mango,
tamarind, and other trees, giving place gradually to long
lines and avenues of palms bordering the fresher verdure
of irrigated rice-fields in the lower reaches of the valley
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