Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/156

 the words, "Take us across all woes and dangers as across the river (sindhu) in a boat;" and in the later literature one who has accomplished his purpose or mastered his subject is very frequently described as "having reached the farther shore " (pāraga). The Atharva-veda, on the other hand, contains some passages showing that its composers were acquainted with the ocean.

Mountains are constantly mentioned in the Rigveda, and rivers are described as flowing from them. The Himālaya ("abode of snow") range in general is evidently meant by the "snowy" (himavantaḥ) mountains which are in the keeping of the Creator. But no individual peak is mentioned with the exception of Mūjavat, which is indirectly referred to as the home of Soma. This peak, it is to be inferred from later Vedic literature, was situated close to the Kabul Valley, and was probably one of the mountains to the south-west of Kashmir. The Atharva-veda also mentions two other mountains of the Himālaya. One of these is called Trikakud, the "three-peaked" (in the later literature Trikūṭa, and even now Trikōta), through the valley at the foot of which flows the Asiknī (Chenab). The other is Nāvaprabhraṃçana ("sinking of the ship"), doubtless identical with the Naubandhana ("binding of the ship") of the epic and the Manoravasarpaṇa of the Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa, on which the ship of Manu is said to have rested when the deluge subsided. The Rigveda knows nothing of the Vindhya range, which divides Northern India from the southern triangle of the peninsula called the Dekhan; nor does it mention the Narmadā River (now Nerbudda),