The least breadth of the Ganges is eight miles, and its greatest twenty. Its depth where it is shallowest is fully a hundred feet. The people who live in the furthest-off part are the Gangarides, whose king possesses 1000 horse, 700 elephants, and 60,000 foot in apparatus of war.
Of the Indians some cultivate the soil, very many follow war, and others trade. The noblest and richest manage public affairs, administer justice, and sit in council with the kings. There exists also a fifth class, consisting of those most eminent for their wisdom, who, when sated with life, seek death by mounting a burning funeral pile. Those, however, who have become the devotees of a sterner sect, and pass their life in the woods, hunt elephants, which, when made quite tame and docile, they use for ploughing and for riding on.
In the Ganges there is an island extremely populous, occupied by a very powerful nation whose king keeps under arms 50,000 foot and 4000 horse. In fact no one invested with kingly power ever keeps on foot a military force without a very great number of elephants and foot and cavalry.
The Prasian nation, which is extremely powerful, inhabits a city called Palibôtra, whence some call the nation itself the Palibôtri. Their
horses.' These Aśvapati were a line of princes whose territory, according to the 12th book of the Râmâyaṇa, lay on the right or north bank of the Vipâśa (Hyphasis or Biâs), in the mountainous part of the Doâb comprised between that river and the Upper Irâvati. Their capital is called in the poem of Vâlmiki Râjagṛiha, which still exists under the name of Râjagiri. At some distance from this there is a chain of heights called Sekandar-giri, or 'Alexander's mountain.'—See St.-Martin's E'tude, &c. pp. 108-111.
