at sindhu
might better be translated by "sea," a change of meaning, if so it can
be called, fully explained by the geographical conditions of the
country. There are places where people could swim across the Indus,
there are others where no eye could tell whether the boundless expanse
of water should be called river or sea. The two run into each other,
as every sailor knows, and naturally the meaning of sindhu, river,
runs into the meaning of sindhu, sea.

But besides the two great rivers, the Indus and the Ganges--in
Sanskrit the Ganga, literally the Go-go--we have the smaller rivers,
and many of their names also agree with the names preserved to us by
the companions of Alexander.[214]

The Yamuna, the Jumna, was known to Ptolemy as [Greek: Diamouna],[215]
to Pliny as Jomanes, to Arrian, somewhat corrupted, as Jobares.[216]

The _S_utudri, or, as it was afterward called, _S_atadru, meaning
"running in a hundred streams," was known to Ptolemy as [Greek:
Zadardes] or [Greek: Zarados]; Pliny called it Sydrus; and Megasthenes,
too, was probably acquainted with it as [Greek: Zadardes]. In the
Veda[217] it formed with the Vipa_s_ the frontier of the Punjab, and we
hear of fierce battles fought at that time, it may be on the same spot
where in 1846 the battle of the Sutledge was fought by Sir Hugh Gough
and Sir Henry Hardinge. It was probably on the Vipa_s_ (later Vipa_s_a),
a north-western tributary of the Sutledge, that Alexander's army turned
back. The river was then called Hyphasis; Pliny calls it Hypasis,[218] a
very fair approximation to the Vedic Vipa_s_, which means "unfettered."
Its modern name is Bias or Bejah.

The next river on the west is the Vedic Parush_n_i, better known as
Iravati,[219] which Strabo calls Hyarotis, while Arrian gives it a
more Greek appearance by calling it Hydraotes. It is the modern Rawi.
It was this river which the Ten Kings when attacking the T_ri_tsus
under Sudas tried to cross from the west by cutting off its water. But
their stratagem failed, and they perished in the river (Rig-Veda VII.
18, 8-9).

We then come to the Asikni, which means "black." That river had another
name also, _K_andrabhaga, which means "streak of the moon." The Greeks,
however, pronounced that [Greek: Sandarophagos], and this had the
unlucky meaning of "the devourer of Alexander." Hesychius tells us that
in order to avert the bad omen Alexander changed the name of that river
into [Greek: Akesines], which would