Definition of "ghat" [‖Ghat]

• A broad flight of steps leading down to the bank of a river in India, used especially by bathers. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Marched down to the ghat, which is generally speaking narrow and very strong, opening out here and there, into easier parts extending down the stream all the way; this stream loses itself suddenly, but after a little distance it is replaced by another from the right, where ravines enter: here the pass is well adapted for pillage, elsewhere the sides are so steep, that robbers could not dispose of their plunder."
• "-- Marched ten miles: the road from the camp extended up an acclivity, the ground becoming more broken than usual to the mouth of the ghat, which is four miles distant; thence up to the ghat which resembles much the Bolan Pass, it extends up an inclined plane over a shingly road."
• "India's frontier and "the snows," is the ghat (a ghat is a large stone stairway descending to the river), where the good Hindu gives his dead to the flames, and the muddy inlet from the Ganges where this occurs is dedicated to Vishnu, "the sleeper on the waters," a name singularly appropriate to a place where the ashes of the dead are consigned to the bosom of "Mother Ganga.""