Page:The journal of the Royal Geographic Society of London. Volume 34, 1864. (IA s572id13663720).pdf/255

Rh I have often been struck by the indications of considerable amounts of change of temperature within what we may call our own times. The proofs of this are to be found in many parts of the great Himalayan chain. These consist in the enormous terminal moraines which in so many places abut on the larger rivers, down to which point glaciers must once have descended, and which in some cases must have rivalled in length the present ones of the Mustakh Range. If other evidence be required as to these older glaciers, it is to be seen in the long furrows cut out of the solid rock as if with a chisel wielded by a gigantic hand, but more neatly than any chisel would leave its work. Nowhere are these great striations better seen than in the Shigar Loombah, the ravine from Thyarlung on the right bank, some 3 miles up, where the hard slates have been ground into rounded bosses, and streaked in the line of the ravine.

Among the proofs that there has been a change of temperature of recent date are the following. Many Passes which were used even in the time of Rajah Ahmed, Shah of Skardo, are now closed. The road to Yarkund over the Baltoro glacier which before his time was known as the Mustakh, has by the increase of the ice near the pass become quite impracticable. The men of the Braldoh valley were accordingly ordered to search for another route, which they found in the present pass, at the head of the Punmah glacier above Chiring.

Again, the Jusserpo La can now be crossed only on foot; whereas in former times ponies could be taken over it. The pass at the head of the Hoh Loombah is now never used, though there is a tradition that it was once a pass; no one, however, of the present generation that I could hear of had ever crossed it. Certain large glaciers have advanced, such as that at Arundu, of which the old men assured me that in their young days the terminal cliff was 1 mile distant from the village. Mr. Vigne says, “it was a considerable distance,” it is now only about 400 yards. A like increase has taken place at Punmah, where within the last six years the old road has been completely covered by the ice and moraine, and where Mahomed, my guide, told me the old camping ground was, now lies a quarter of a mile under the ice: the overthrown trees and bushes plainly testified to the recent advance which this mass had made; this evidence was equally well seen along the side of the Arundu glacier.

Even so lately as twelve years since, the people of Shigar were enabled to get two crops off their fields; thus the first crop (barley), was followed as soon as cut by a second (kungǔni) which ripened by the end of autumn. Since that time it will not come to maturity, so that after the barley the fields now lie fallow, and the kungǔni has now to be sown earlier in the season.