Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/108

98 are little lower than Mont Blanc; their roads are dizzy shelves encircling more tremendous cliffs, or swinging jhúlas spanning frightful gorges, whose depths seem lost in the bowels of the earth. "There, far above the habitation of man, no living thing exists, no sound is heard, the very echo of the traveler's footsteps startles him in the awful solitude and silence that reigns in these august dwellings of everlasting snow." Deep ravines penetrate between imposing groups of inaccessible mountains, torrents hew out their tortuous courses over precipitous slopes, and the gathered influx of innumerable lines of drainage gives rise to the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmapootra, great and sacred streams whose head-waters here pursue their rocky and dangerous descent to the plains of India. Between the higher ranges nestle the fertile valleys of Nepaul, Bootan, and Assam, themselves high table-lands upon the declivity of the snowy peaks; and to the east, beneath the alternate shadows of the Hindoo-Koosh and the Himalayas, reposes the fragrant vale of Cashmere.

As we approach the mountains we traverse three distinct regions: the green "Tarai," marshy and insalubrious; the middle country, a belt of wooded land, arid and with a porous soil; and lastly, at 10,000 feet, the dry and unhealthy marais. The nucleal range we find is beset with numerous branches, whose long axes stretch out in waving and complicated lines from the central ridge, lie furcating and multiplying like tree-limbs as they embank the rivers, or surround occasional basins, into whose fruitful beauty the traveler peers. Clay slate, very micaceous, and passing into sandstone with interstratified limestone, forms the lithological basis of the mountains, and through the passes ramifying veins of quartz and granite. The tertiary formation extends up the valleys and laps over the foot-hills. The ascent now becomes strewed with erratic blocks, and angular bowlders of granite occur far removed from their origin, while ravines and stream-beds are picturesquely strewed with transported masses. At times the accumulation of bowlders becomes so extensive as to choke the valleys, or rise in confused piles and in unstable equilibrium for a hundred feet above the brawling streams which pass between them. The valley of the Shayuk is filled with these bowlders; and, after its waters unite with the Indus, their swollen floods pour through a narrow channel beneath enormous heaps of angular fragments. Again, about Iskardo, two banks of bowlders project upon the valley forty to fifty feet high; in fact, along the Indus immense tracts are covered with granitic masses; they lie over the alluvial land, intermixed indeed with it, and form natural features from their size. The valley of the Thawar is fairly blocked at one end by the collection of bowlders, and long hills are composed of such débris. For almost a day's journey on the mountain-sides, west of Pok, limestone blocks occur in great numbers, transported from indeterminate distances, as no limestone occurs here in situ. A glacier occurs upon the Parang Pass, not of large proportions, which, wedged between the