Appendix A 2 75
time the width, volume, and velocity suggested by these boulders, now for ever dry. Many of them seemed to be granitic, though granite strata were not seen in the neighbouring heights, which here—as generally across the Aksai Chin—rose to an elevation of from one thousand to three thousand feet above the flat areas. The existence of such tremendous hydraulic force acting on materials no longer seen in the position of upheaval, hints of the degradation of complete strata of the towering masses that have been crumbled from a uniform elevation perhaps not less than that of Mount Everest. When one considers the wide-stretching sands of all Central Asia and the empire valleys of India as being probable deposits from these heights, the supposition just made seems not over-bold. There is thus imaged to the eye of the imagination a vast mound one thousand miles in length, five hundred miles in breadth, and five miles or six miles in height above the sea. Its southern front and portions of its flanks are exposed, with varying directness, to moisture-laden winds from the great seas. Here then the secular attack upon the mound will be most fierce. If the first snows that fall on the plateau's top are frozen by perennial cold into a shield protecting against hydraulic action—yet the lower vertical or inclined surfaces will be rapidly eaten away, and in their fall the higher snow-covered portions are soon involved. The débris is partly swept into the engulfing sea, never to be seen again—partly deposited as new shore-line, varied in direction by secret ocean currents; and partly left as high, secondary formations, constituting a rough ramp,—cut by a hundred streams,—yet gradually rising from plain to plateau. On the northern slope, looking toward the vast interior, which received only the poor precipitation coming southward from Arctic waters and the scant meltings of the plateau's snows, the process of
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