gap made by the transverse glen in the southern range we saw in the background mountains swelling up higher, and in part covered with snow.
The ascent up to the first threshold-pass is very gentle. Its summit affords an uninterrupted view of the next gathering-basin, which is more extensive and more complicated in construction. The range that borders it on the south does not appear to be pierced by a single one of its head-feeders; but on the other hand the opposite, northern range is cut through in no less than five different places. Whereas in general the different head-feeders unite into one stream before they pierce the range, that is to say in the latitudinal valley itself, in this particular gathering-basin each of the five brooks breaks its own way independently through the northern range, and it is only on the northern side of this range that they converge into one stream, that is to say outside the domain of their own latitudinal valley.
Descending from the pass, we continued west-north-west through the gathering-basin. Its principal drainage-artery begins on the pass itself and picks up a whole series of small rainwater channels, all more or less deeply grooved, that come down off the mountains to the south. Some of these occasioned us a good deal of trouble to get over. The latitudinal valley is broader on that side of the pass than on its east side. A transverse glen, called, I was told, Luma-biba, and coming straight from the south, ought possibly with greater right than the one just mentioned to be called the principal artery of the basin; even then it contained an insignificant rivulet from some adjacent springs. At intervals we observed fresh traces of encampments, though there were at that time no nomads in the neighbourhood. Through the next transverse glen, which is unimportant, and cuts through the northern range where it drops to the altitude of hills, we perceived the flat, extensive latitudinal valley which, so far as Mollah Schah could remember, was the
He d in, Tourney in Central Asia. I i . 19
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