IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Scientific Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899-1902 : vol.4 |
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Citation Information
284 WESTWARDS TO LADAK.
along this, after we had chopped away the fringe of ice which had formed there, we led our camels. The annexed photographs will give an idea of what the place
looks like.
December 2nd. The track keeps close to the shore, at one or two meters from the water's edge, seldom at one or two hundred meters where the beach is level, and it follows with irritating loss of time every winding of the shore. Every now and again we came across a thin clump of bushes, almost always growing at the edge of the flat gravelly screes, which spread out opposite the ends of the glens. on both sides of the lake. The indications of former higher water-levels assumed the form partly of terraces, partly of merely lighter-coloured lines and shelves; the
former frequently have abrupt edges. There are lines too on the southern shore, corresponding to those on the northern shore. In the coves that lie below the outlets of the glens, with soft material for their floor, we were often able to observe ramparts sharply and distinctly marked and regularly rounded, and ranging at different elevations. They are however different from the ridges which in practically every bay run close along the water's edge. These latter consist of earth, mud, and clay and are seldom more than i m. high. Their shape alone betrays that they were formed in a different way from the flat ramparts that lie farther back from the water-line. Both faces are very steep, and more particularly the inner one is generally vertical, sometimes indeed even overhanging (fig. i 84). There can be no doubt that this ridge owes its existence to ice-pressure in the spring, when the lake rises, set- ting the ice in motion, whereupon the wind presses it forcibly against the shore. But we only observed this ridge in the bays, nowhere on the capes.
Most of the capes coincide with buttresses j and offshoots from the range on the north, so that
there is generally but very scant room left for the track. In some places, as the accompanying illustration (fig. 185) shows, the actual cape is undermined by the combined wave-beat and ice-pressure. Here
too at the base of the rocks there is as a rule an
abrasion terrace, but little more than I() m. broad,
with two belts of Algae growing on it, and beyond that the water of the lake is dark, without any lighter tints to indicate shallows. These capes frequently show
in profile as in fig. i 86. At the foot of one of these capes, consisting of granite, a heap of immense stones had accumulated; here we had to make a road, as well as unload some of the camels, in order to get past. When the rocks on the southern shore are thrown into the shade in the afternoon, so that their projecting headlands
Fig. 186.
Fig. 184.
Fig. 185.
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