Himalayan Journals — Complete: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
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Himalayan Journals — Complete: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains
From the village I ascended to the top of the terrace, which is a
perfectly level, sandy, triangular plain, pointing down the valley at
the fork of the latter, and abutting against the flank of a steep,
rocky, snow-topped mountain to the northward. Its length is probably
half a mile from north to south, but it runs for two miles westward up
the valley, gradually contracting. The surface, though level, is very
uneven, being worn into hollows, and presenting ridges and hillocks of
blown sand and gravel, with small black tufts of rhododendron. Enormous
boulders of gneiss and granite were scattered over the surface; one of
the ordinary size, which I measured, was seventy feet in girth, and
fifteen feet above the ground, into which it had partly sunk. From the
southern pointed end I took sketches of the opposite flanks of the
valleys east and west. The river was about 400 feet below me, and
flowed in a little flat lake-bed; other terraces skirted it, cut out,
as it were, from the side of that I was on. On the opposite flank of
the valley were several superimposed terraces, of which the highest
appeared to tally with the level I occupied, and the lowest was raised
very little above the river; none were continuous for any distance, but
the upper one in particular, could be most conspicuously traced up and
down the main valley, whilst, on looking across to the eastern valley,
a much higher, but less distinctly marked one appeared on it. The road
to the pass lay west-north-west up the north bank of the Yangma river,
on the great terrace; for two miles it was nearly level along the
gradually narrowing shelf, at times dipping into the steep gulleys
formed by lateral torrents from the mountains; and as the terrace
disappeared, or melted, as it were, into the rising floor of the
valley, the path descended upon the lower and smaller shelf.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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