Kashmir Part 13

But the most serious source of uncertainty in the measurement of the alt.i.tude of a peak is the refraction of the atmosphere. A ray of light from a peak to an observer's eye does not travel along a straight line, but a.s.sumes a curved path concave to the earth. The ray enters the observer's eye--I quote from Colonel Burrard--in a direction tangential to the curve at that point, and this is the direction in which the observer sees the peak. It makes the peak appear too high.

This refraction is greatest in the morning and evening, and least in the middle of the day; it is different in summer from what it is in winter. One of the great Himalayan peaks visible from the plains of India would appear, from observations with a theodolite made to it from the plains, to fall 500 feet between sunrise and the afternoon, and to rise again 300 feet before sunset; and even in the afternoon, when it would appear lowest, it would still be too high by perhaps 700 feet. This is obviously a very fruitful source of error, and the difficulty of determining the error is increased by the fact that the curvature of the ray varies with the rarefaction of the atmosphere. In the higher alt.i.tude, when the rarefaction of the atmosphere increases, the ray a.s.sumes a less curved path. All these possible sources of error due to the rarefaction of the atmosphere have been most carefully studied, but even now we must allow 10 to 30 feet as possible error due to the rarefaction of the atmosphere.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MOUNTAIN GLEN, BEFORE THE MELTING OF THE SNOWS]

Summarising the possible sources of error in fixing the height of K2 we may say the error may be from--

Errors of observation 20 ft.

Adoption of erroneous height for observing station 30 ft.

Variation of snow-level from the mean Unknown Deviation of gravity Unknown Atmospheric refraction 10 to 30 ft.

K2, as I have said, though on the borders of the Kashmir State, and visible from the range which bounds the Kashmir valley, is not visible from the valley itself. But Nanga Parbat can be seen from near Baramula and from a few other parts of the valley, and is the most striking object in the view from Gulmarg and other points of the northward-facing slope of the Pir Panjal. It ranks eighth among the mountains of the world, except K2 all the others being in the Nepal Himalayas. The order of the mountains is:--

Feet.

Mount Everest 29,002 K2 28,250 Kinchinjunga 28,146 Makalu 27,790 T15 26,867 Dhaulagiri 26,795 x.x.x 26,658 Nanga Parbat 26,620

Being more accessible than the remote K2 the observations for its height were made at much closer quarters, the nearest observation point being 43 miles distant instead of 61 as in the case of K2. It was observed in all from eleven different points, of which the most remote was 133 miles. But until it had been measured by the Survey it had been marked on maps as only 19,000 feet.

Colonel Burrard says it is "the most isolated and perhaps the most imposing of all the peaks of Asia." It certainly is remarkable for its isolation. With the exception of subordinate pinnacles rising from its own b.u.t.tresses, no peak within 60 miles of it attains an alt.i.tude of more than 17,000 feet. Throughout a circle of 120 miles' diameter Nanga Parbat surpa.s.ses all other summits by more than 9000 feet. And its upper 5000 feet are precipitous. It stands out therefore in solitary n.o.bleness, and it can be seen on its northern side rising 23,000 feet from the Indus, there only 3500 above the sea. But whether it is of all mountains the really most imposing it is not easy to say, and personally I almost cling to Kinchinjunga. Rakapos.h.i.+ in Hunza, which is 25,550 feet in alt.i.tude, and can be seen rising sheer up from the Hunza River 5000 feet above sea-level, is also wonderfully impressive. There is a peak on the Pamirs 25,146 feet high which can be seen rising abruptly from the plains of Turkestan, which are but a little over 3000 feet; and there is the Musherbrum Peak near K2 which is 25,660 feet--all of which I have seen, and which I find it hard to place exactly in order of relative impressiveness. But if Nanga Parbat cannot be placed in unquestionably the first position, it will in most men's estimation approximate to it, and must in any case be reckoned among the few most striking sights in the world.

Of what are these great peaks built up? No one has yet ascended their summits, and as Mr. Hayden points out, the geologist has to do his work at close quarters, and not like the surveyor from a distance. So the composition of the highest peaks is rarely known in any detail, though the general character of the rocks can be ascertained with a fair approximation to certainty, from observation of material on the flanks, and from a distant view of the weathering character and apparent structure of the peaks themselves. From such observations it has been found that almost all the peaks of 25,000 feet or more in height are composed of granite, gneiss, and a.s.sociated crystalline rocks. It had long be supposed that some of the granites found on the flanks of the great peaks which presented a foliated appearance were of sedimentary origin, and had therefore been once deposited beneath the sea. But their truly intrusive nature was recognised by the late Lieutenant-General M'Mahon, who proved conclusively that the great central gneissose rock of the Himalayas was in reality a granite crushed and foliated by pressure. It may certainly be taken that both K2 and Nanga Parbat are composed of granite, and have been intruded or compressed upward from beneath the earth's crust.

Mr. Hayden further concludes that the exceptional height of these great peaks is due to their being composed of granite, for either the superior power of the granite to resist the atmospheric forces tending to their degradation has caused them to stand as isolated ma.s.ses above surrounding areas of more easily eroded rocks, or they are areas of special elevation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LAKE s.h.i.+SHA NAG, LIDAR VALLEY]

Now it is found that the axes of the great mountain ranges are also composed of granite, and it seems probable that special elevating forces have been at work to raise certain parts of their ranges above the general level of the whole. And when once such elevation has been brought about, the disparity between the higher peaks and the intervening less elevated area would undoubtedly be intensified by the destructive forces at work, for the mantle of snow and ice, while slowly carrying on its work of abrasion, would serve as a protection for the peaks against the disintegrating forces of the atmosphere, while the lower unprotected areas would be more rapidly eroded.

So argues Mr. Hayden, who further demonstrates that when, during the development of the Himalayas as a mighty mountain range vast ma.s.ses of granite welled up from below, forcing their way through and lifting up the pre-existing rocks superimposed upon them, it is probable that, owing to dissimilarity of composition and to structural weaknesses in certain portions of the earth's crust, movement was more intense at some points than at others, and that the granite was raised into more or less dome-like ma.s.ses standing above the general level of the growing range, and subsequently carved by the process of erosion into cl.u.s.ters of peaks.

The great peaks being thus of intrusive origin, the question naturally arises whether they are _still_ being intruded upward; whether those great forces at work beneath the surface of the earth are still impelling them upward; and if so, whether they are being forced upward more rapidly than the atmospheric forces are wearing down their summits. From the geological standpoint Mr. Hayden says that it is not at present possible to say whether the elevatory movement is still in progress, but he adds that many phenomena observable in the Himalayas lead us to infer that local elevation has until quite recently been operative, and the numerous earthquakes still occurring with such frequency and violence forcibly remind us that the Himalayas have by no means reached a period of even comparative rest. The surveyor can as yet give us no more certain answer. Colonel Burrard says the original observations of the great peaks made between 1850 and 1860 were not sufficiently prolonged at any one station to enable us to rely with certainty on the values of the height then obtained. When a slow variation in height has to be determined it is better to carry out a long series of observations from one station only, rather than to take a number of observations from different stations, as is necessary and as was done in determining the absolute height of peaks.

But in 1905 the Survey of India commenced a series of observations from one station, and it is proposed to observe the heights of several peaks for some years and at different seasons in each year. Then if a reliable series of results be once obtained, a similar set of observations can be repeated at a subsequent date, and any actual change of height that has occurred in the interval may be discovered.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DISTANT VIEW OF NANGA PARBAT FROM THE KAMRI Pa.s.s]

Until these observations are made we cannot say for certain whether the great peaks are still rising.

THE MOUNTAIN RANGES

So far we have considered the isolated peaks rather than the ranges themselves. It remains to study these latter. All of them are popularly regarded as forming part of the "Himalayas." But Himalaya--p.r.o.nounced with the stress on the second syllable--simply means the "abode of snow"; and geographers have had to define the separate ranges into which this great Himalayan region is divided. The name of the Great Himalaya is consequently reserved for the supreme range which extends from the western borders of China, carries the great peaks, Mount Everest and Kinchinjunga, and runs through k.u.maon and Kashmir to Nanga Parbat, and possibly farther. This is the culminating range of the earth's surface. The range to the north, on which stands K2 and some satellite peaks of 26,000 feet, is neither so long nor has it quite such lofty peaks. It is known as the Karakoram range because a pa.s.s called the Karakoram Pa.s.s crosses it.

But a pa.s.s called the Mustagh also crosses it, and Mustagh means Ice Mountain, whereas Karakoram means black gravel. Mustagh, therefore, appears to me a much more appropriate name for this gigantic range of ice-clad mountains. It so happens that I am the only European who has crossed both pa.s.ses. Each of them is close upon 19,000 feet in alt.i.tude, but the Karakoram, very curiously, has in summer no snow upon it, and the route leads over black gravel. It is a better known pa.s.s than the former, and, consequently, the name of black gravel got the start, and now this superb range of mountains is doomed for all time to suffer from this absurd nomenclature.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MOUNT KOLAHOI, LIDAR VALLEY]

The range, however, lies far at the back of Kashmir, and it is not so much with it as with the true Himalaya range that we are here concerned. The mountain ranges which encircle the valley of Kashmir are the final prolongations of that mighty range which runs from the borders of Burma thirteen hundred miles away, and bifurcating at the Sutlej River, forms with its subsidiary spurs the cradle in which the Kashmir valley is set.

The southern branch of this bifurcation is known as the Pir Panjal range, and is that which bounds Kashmir on the south. It is the largest of all the lesser Himalayan ranges, and even at its extremity in Kashmir it carries many peaks exceeding 15,000 feet; the Tatakuti Peak, 30 miles south-west of Srinagar, 15,524 feet in height, being the most conspicuous.

The northern branch of the bifurcation at the Sutlej River of the great Himalayan range culminates in the Nun Kun peaks (23,410 feet and 23,250 feet), which stand conspicuously 3000 feet above the general crest of the range, and can be seen on clear days from Gulmarg. From near them, not far from the Zoji-la, an oblique range branches from the great Himalayan range, and const.i.tutes the parting between the Jhelum River and the Kishenganga, the latter river draining the angle formed by the bifurcation. The height of this North Kashmir range, as Colonel Burrard calls it, is greatest near the point of bifurcation, one of its peaks, Haramokh (16,890 feet), reaching above the snow-line, and being the most conspicuous object which meets the eye of a traveller entering the valley from the south. Farther westward the range ramifies and declines.

The main line of the great range of the Himalayas has meanwhile continued from the remarkable depression at the Zoji Pa.s.s along by the Kamri Pa.s.s, to the immense mountain b.u.t.tress of Nanga Parbat which, overhanging the deep defiles of the Indus, seems to form a fitting end to the mighty range which started on the confines of China. But there are great mountains beyond the Indus also, and whether these form a continuation of the great Himalayan axis which the river Indus would in that case have merely cut through in the gorges below Nanga Parbat, or whether the mountains west of the Indus are part of a separate range, we shall not know till these latter have been geologically examined.

CHAPTER XIV

THE STORY OF THE MOUNTAINS

How these peaks and mountain ranges arose is a fascinating and impressive study. It has been made by Mr. Hayden, who, in the fourth part of the scientific memoir quoted in the previous chapter, has compiled their history from his own personal investigations and the accounts of his fellow-observers in the Geological Survey of India.

And surely a scientific man could have no more inspiring task than the unravelling of the past history of the mighty Himalaya. Here we have clue after clue traced down, the meaning of each extracted, and the broad general outline of the mountain's story told in all its grand impressiveness, till one sees the earth pulsating like a living being, rising and subsiding, and rising again, now sinking inward till the sea flows over the depression, then rising into continental areas, anon subsiding again beneath the waters, and finally, under t.i.tanic lateral pressure and crustal compression, corrugating into mighty folds, while vast ma.s.ses of granite well up from below, force their way through, lift up the pre-existing rocks and toss themselves upward into the final climax of the great peaks which distinguish the Himalaya from every other range of mountains in the world.

For millions of years a perpetual struggle has been going on between the inherent earth forces pressing upward and the opposing forces of denudation wearing away the surface. Sometimes the internal forces are in commotion, or the contracting crust of the earth finds some weak spot and crumples upward, and the mountains win. A period of internal quiescence follows, and the rain and snow, the frost and heat, gain the victory, and wear down the proudest mountains--as they have worn away the snowy glacier mountains which once stood in Rajputana.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RAMPUR, JHELUM VALLEY ROAD]

Of all this wonderful past the mountains themselves bear irrefutable evidence. Near Rampur, on the road into Kashmir, are bold cliffs of limestone, a rock which is merely the acc.u.mulation of the relics of generations of minute marine sh.e.l.l-fishes. These cliffs, now upturned to almost the perpendicular, must once have lain flat beneath the surface of the ocean. High up in the Sind valley, embedded in the rocks, are fossil oysters, showing that they too must once have lain beneath the sea. More telling still at Zewan, a few miles east of Srinagar, are fossils of land plants immediately below strata of rocks containing fossils of marine animals and plants, from which may be concluded that the land subsided under the sea, and was afterwards thrust up again. Again, an examination of the rocks on the Takht-i-Suliman shows that they are merely dried lava, and must have had a volcanic origin--perhaps beneath the sea. And an investigation of the rocks on the flanks of Nanga Parbat has shown that they are of granite which must have been intruded from the interior of the earth.

Everywhere there is evidence that even K2 and Nanga Parbat lay beneath the sea, and that where now are mountains once rolled the ocean; that some once lay in soft, flat layers of mud or sand, or plant and sh.e.l.l deposit on the ocean bottom, while others, as the ocean bottom was upraised above the waters, were obtruded through them; and that everywhere there has been an immense pressing and crumpling of the earth's crust--a rising and subsiding, a throbbing and pulsation, which at one time has brought Kashmir in direct contact by land with Madagascar and South Africa, and at another has brought it into through communication by sea with both America and Europe; and which, finally, has projected it upward thousands of feet into the air. The evidence, moreover, shows that millions of years have pa.s.sed while these t.i.tanic movements have been working out their marvellous results.

Who can but be impressed by such ages and such forces? Who that looks on those lovely Kashmir mountains, and on the mighty peaks which rise behind, and has learnt their long eventful history, can help being impressed by the immensity of time their structure betokens, by the magnitude of the movements unceasingly at work within, and by the dignity with which they yet present a front so impa.s.sive and so sublime?

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN THE SIND VALLEY]

To realise the full, long-measured roll of their majestic evolution we should have to go back to the time when the swift revolving sun--itself one only among a hundred million other stars of no less magnitude--swished off from its circ.u.mference the wreath of fiery mist now called the Earth; and we should have to trace that mist, cooling and consolidating, first to a molten ma.s.s with a plastic crust enveloped in a dense and watery atmosphere, and then to a hardened surface of dry land with cavities in which the ocean settled. But the story, as it is with more detailed accuracy known, commences at the time when a shallow sea covered central and northern India, and extended over the site of the present Himalaya, including Kashmir and the region of the mighty peaks behind. This, then, is the first essential fact to lay hold of, that at the commencement of the authentic history of Kashmir, the whole--vale and mountain peak alike--lay unborn beneath the sea.

How long ago this was it is not possible to say within a million years or so. But this much may be said with certainty, that the period is to be reckoned not in thousands, nor yet in hundreds of thousands, but in millions of years. Geologists have names for different geological epochs, and do not usually speak of them by definite numbers of years, for there is still much controversy as to the precise length of time occupied by each. But to fix in the mind of the general reader a rough idea of the immense periods of time with which we are dealing in tracing the history of the mountains, it is useful to speak in terms of numbers, even though they may be only very approximately correct.

We may then a.s.sume that the oldest rocks in Kashmir were deposited in sediment at the bottom of the afore-mentioned shallow sea a hundred million years ago. Some geologists and biologists think that a still longer time must have elapsed. Some physicists would maintain that even so much is not allowable. But as an average opinion, we may take a hundred million years ago as the commencement of Kashmir history.

What were the limits of the sea which then rolled over the site of Kashmir is not yet precisely known. But the lower portion of the Indian peninsula was then dry land, and connected by land with Africa; and the sea probably extended westward to Europe and eastward to China. Into it the rivers bore down the debris and detritus worked off by the rain from the dry land; and thus were slowly deposited, in the long course of many million years, sediments hundreds and thousands of feet in thickness which, subsequently upheaved and hardened, form the Kashmir mountains of the present day.

The first great movement of which authentic record has yet been traced took place at the close of the Jaunsar period. The bosom of the earth heaved restlessly, and what had already been deposited in the depths of the sea now emerged above the surface. Volcanoes burst through the crust, and the sedimentary deposits, hardened into rock, were covered with sheets of lava and volcanic ash, which now form the hills at the back of Srinagar, including the Takht-i-Suliman.

This was Kashmir's first appearance--not, however, in the form of a beautiful valley surrounded by forests and snow-capped mountains, but rather in the form of an archipelago of bare volcanic islands. And even these were not permanent, for a period of general subsidence followed and they slowly sank beneath the sea which was then probably connected with America.

During the Devonian period Kashmir was still submerged; but in a subsequent portion of the time when the Carbonaceous system was being deposited there was a second period of great volcanic activity, when the southern portion of Kashmir again formed an archipelago of volcanic islands.

Eventually all Kashmir emerged, and became part of the mainland of India at that time joined with Africa; so that Kashmir which had before been joined by sea with America was now joined by land with Africa. Such are the mighty movements of this seemingly immovable earth.

But it was only for a brief s.p.a.ce that Kashmir was visible. Then once again, in mid-Carboniferous times, it subsided beneath the sea, there to remain for some millions of years till the early Tertiary period, four million years ago, when it again emerged, and the sea was gradually pushed back from Tibet and the adjacent Himalaya, till by the end of the Eocene period both Tibet and the whole Himalaya had finally become dry land. Kashmir was now a portion of the continental area and the culminating effort of the earth forces was at hand. For yet another period of great volcanic activity ensued, connected, perhaps, with the crustal disturbances to which the origin of the Himalaya is attributed. Ma.s.ses of molten granite were extruded from beneath the earth's surface through the sedimentary deposit. And these granitic ma.s.ses, issuing from the fiery interior of the earth, pus.h.i.+ng ever upward, reached and pa.s.sed the level of eternal snow till they finally settled into the line of matchless peaks now known as the Himalaya.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LAKE s.h.i.+SHA NAG AT SUNSET]

This then, briefly, is a record of the successive phases of upheaval and subsidence through which Kashmir has pa.s.sed. Through by far the greater portion of the earth's history--through perhaps ninety out of the hundred million years--Kashmir has lain beneath the sea.

And it is only within the last four million years that it has finally emerged.