Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/346

Rh here, and I think elsewhere, gives Daban as the Mongol equivalent for 'mountain range.' In this I cannot but think he is mistaken. Dábán in oriental Turki (and presumably in Mongol, if it be a Mongol word also) means, not a range, but a pass, or what is in Savoy called a col. Thus, on one of the routes from India to Yarkand there is a pass called the Yanghi Dábán, 'the New Pass.' 'New Range' would be nonsense; but 'Yanghi-daban-Range,' as some maps have it, is lawful nomenclature.

The Pass is that feature in a mountain range which most interests travellers, and which they hear most frequently named; passes always have names; ranges, among people who have no books of geography, are apt to have none. Hence, with imperfect knowledge of the language, it gets assumed that the name of a Pass is the name of a Range.

This occurs in various languages. In maps of China we find mountain ranges called by such names as Pe-ling and Tsin-ling, as if ling were 'mountain range.' But ling is 'a pass.' Tsin-ling-shan, 'the mountain of the Tsin Pass,' would be right. Huc, again, in spite of all the monstrous Tibetan passes that he traversed, never discovered that La in Tibetan meant a Pass and not a mountain. And this leads him to his preposterous derivation of Potâla, or as he chooses to call it Bouddha-La, the Vatican of the Dalai-Lama, from Buddha-La, 'mountain of Buddha' (the words would really mean 'Buddha Pass'), with which it has as much to do as Ben Nevis with the