Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924073057352).pdf/414

 406 SUL Rivers and streams.-Not a single river, unless rain-streams be dignified with the name, intersects the interior of the district. It is traversed however for a considerable distance by the Gumti. The Gumti takes its rise from the Fuljar Tál in an alluvial tract between the rivers Deoli or Garra and Gogra in the district of Shahjahanpur; it has a mean south-easterly direc- tion, but its course is often extremely sinuous, a feature from which its Dame is sometimes with questionable accuracy supposed to have arisen. * It first touches this district on the west, and then flows along its entire north-eastern border at the opposite extremity of which it enters the district of Jaunpur. Within these limits its bed is generally regular, and consists of a superficial stratum of clay overlying an inferior one of sand. The former is usually about five or six feet in depth ; the latter is more uneven ; in some places it is of immense thickness, in others it has been penetrated and found to rest on a second kankar-dotted formation of clay of yet unascertained dimensions. In some places, however, the regularity of the bed is broken by large and curious kankar reefs, the most remarkable of which is in the vicinity of the civil station, where it nearly hinders the passage of the river. The water of the Gumti is sweet and wholesome but not always clear, often being after rain has fallen of a muddy yellow colour, probably attri-. butable to the nature of its bed. Its banks differ greatly from each other, the high bank is generally lofty and abrupt, pierced here and there by ravines bollowed out by the scour of rain floods; though in some places strips of low lying land intervene between the ordinary stream of the riverand the high level, the left bank is low, and the land behind it, on the Fyzabad șide, ascends by a very gentle and gradual incline. Its affluents individually insignificant are numerically important, and fed by them its stream is liable to great and sudden changes. The degree to which it may be affec- ted by this cause in the rainy season will be seen from the following particulars : From November to June its ordinary breadth is under 200 and its depth about 12 or 13 feet, its velocity being then about two miles an hour, and its volume about 5,000 cubic feet: in the heavy floods of last September it attained a depth of 48 feet, its velocity increasing to close upon four miles an hour, and its yolume, where it flowed through the embankments of the new pile bridge at Sultanpur, to more than 100,000 cubic feet; all this time, moreover, an escape was open to it in the inundation of the low lands on its left bank for a distance of a mile or more. Is å might perhaps be explained by the extremely evanescent Dature of that letter, but the correct Sanskrit name is well known, and is not "Ghumti” but “Gomati." The Gomti mentioned in the Vishnu Puran under its Sanskrit namo (Asiatic Society's Journal, 1., 10, (A.D. 1310) : _" Afterwards the waters of the Gangá, the Rahab, the Kuhi, and the Sarju uvite voar the city of Bári." For General Cuoningham says that the Kuhi is un doubtedly the Gomti, the union of the Sarju with the Gomti being a fablc (Elliott's History of India, Vol. I., 49-50). Lator Muhammadan weiters, e.g., Bábar and Abu! L'azl, call it Kodi or Godi. In the Tarikh-1-Farishta it is called Kawah (Elliott, III., 307)."
 * If this derivation were accurate, the name should be " Ghúnti." The absence of the