Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
History
Himalayan Journals — Volume 1: 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.
Illustration--DIAGRAM OF THE GLACIAL TERRACES AT THE FORK OF THE
YANGA VALLEY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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