The Ganges

The Ganges is the major river of northern India and Bangladesh, rising in the Himalayan glaciers of Gangotri and flowing roughly 2,525 kilometers southeast across the Indo-Gangetic Plain before emptying into the Bay of Bengal through the world's largest river delta, shared with the Brahmaputra. Its immense religious significance in Hinduism is treated in full on the family's Divinity Atlas; here it is described in its geographic frame, a snowmelt-and-monsoon-fed river whose basin supports one of the most densely populated regions on Earth.