FROM MT ERENAK-TSCHIMO TO MT SCHA-GANDSCHUM. 131
water, cold and as bright as crystal. It contained fish, and in some places there were wild-duck. At this part I should have known that I was on Littledale's route even though I had not had his map before me; for not only did one of my men, Mollah Schah, who had also accompanied Littledale, recognise the country again, but we also picked up an ass's shoe, an object that can hardly have been left except by Littledale's caravan.
The rocks we observed during that day's march were as follows: a red conglomerate, dipping 8ô towards the S. 4o° W., not far from Rinak-sumdo; on the right of our route we saw several similar small bosses and ridges, in which however the strata appeared to dip 3o° to 45° towards the N. and NE.; in a small detached knob near the first obo was the usual fine-grained rock, dipping 78° S. Next in the steep gully by which we climbed up Erenak-tschimo, amongst hard rock, we perceived a hard resonant greenstone, dipping 64° W. Higher up it occurred again, though not very generally, in the form of gravel in the bed of the river, while
at its sides this sharp-edged detritus gravel was in places piled or built up as it were into sharply defined terraces either by running water or by avalanches of snow. A few meters farther up in the same ravine or watercourse there cropped out a light red granite, hard and fine-grained, and tilted 76° towards the N. 5° W.; and not very far above that was a hard crystalline rock, dipping 77° towards the N. 33° E. Besides these I collected various other specimens of rock, which, though they only occurred in the loose gravel, tend at any
rate to show that this mountain is of fairly complex composition. Amongst these is a white marble, which occurred not only in fragments of great freshness and wonderful beauty, but also in pieces that are yellowed, brittle, and cracked. This I nowhere discovered as »living» rock: there had been a knoll of it on the right side of the glen, but that is now completely weathered away and destroyed. Further a light-coloured crystalline schist and a black rock, probably diorite or diabase, of which there were only a few fragments higher up in the glen, pointed to the fact that somewhere the mountain must be traversed by veins of these rocks. After that came a white crystalline variety, mottled with some sort of mineral matter; then a friable yellow rock, which put me in mind of pumice. We only found one single specimen of porphyry in the lower part of the glen; it consisted of a hard, dark-green, resonant variety. The little crest with the grotto described above consisted of limestone, dipping 72° towards the S. 15° E., and this same rock appeared to prevail in all the small ranges which stretch with such remarkable regularity east and west in parallel chains, thus bearing no slight resemblance to the mountains on the shores of the Tschargut-tso. In places they may indeed reach an altitude of 200 m., but generally they are much lower. With regard to all the detached fragments that I have just mentioned, it is of course fair to infer that their provenance was in hard rock higher up, probably for the most part in the steep precipice from which the stream
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