国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

CONFIGURATION OF THE SHORE AT CIIIU-GOMMPA.

35

»The reason Moorcroft did not find this channel is quite simple. In his anxiety to miss nothing, he walked along the actual lake side of Mansarowar, and the shingle bank over the effluent channel, beside which he was walking, effectually concealed that channel from his view.» This suggestion reminds one very much of Richard Strachey's saying that as Moorcroft »walked along the edge of the lake, his eye would have been so near the level of the water that a very small irregularity of the beach might have concealed the course of the stream from his view».

To this I will remark that Moorcroft did not walk along the actual lake side

from Chiu-gompa to the point from which he returned. It is true that he went down to the shore from the temple, but then he had already crossed the bed of the channel , which is the important point. Farther on he went along the top of the hills, so much so, that he even complains of intense thirst.

In 1907 and 1908 there was not the slightest sign of any »shingle bank

over the effluent channel». The hard bank Moorcroft speaks of lies some miles farther south and is permanent, whether the lake be high or low. SHERRING says that »storms blowing from the east have thrown up sand at the mouth of the passage to a height of about 4 feet». ' This may have been the case at the time of his visit (1905), but in 1907 there was no such wall. Eastern storms are rather rare and as they come from over the lake, they are not likely to build up any sand walls at such a place as this, which, as a rule, is exposed to the western storms, by which the moving sand is blown out into the lake. But even if there had been a sand wall of some feet in height in 1812, it could not possibly have hidden the channel from Moorcroft's view. In 1907 one could lie down upon the ground at the edge of the lake or at some distance from it, and, turning east, see the surface of its water, and, turning west, see the beginning of the then dry channel. But there was not even a rudiment of a beach of any kind, although some sand had been swept by the winds into the bed of the channel.

In 1848 there was as raised beach» cut through by the effluent channel. Such

beaches seem, under certain conditions, to be formed by the breaking up of the ice in the late spring. After an exceptionally cold winter, the still thick ice may be broken up by hard winds occasionally blowing from the east, and then the pressure of the ice will press up the mud of the lake on its edge and thus form a regular wall round the N.W. bay, where the conditions for its formation are favourable, and

where the strand slowly rises and the lake is shallow. 2

But Moorcroft has not a word to say of any such wall near Chiu-gompa. Even if there had been a raised beach in 1812, which is extremely unlikely, it ought to have been pierced by the bed of the effluent, as it was at the time of Strachey's

I Western Tibet, p. 272.

2 Such was the case, in December 1901, at certain parts of the northern shore of Panggongtso and Tso-ngombo, the lake of Noh. As such a wall consists of mud, it will disappear in a few years, from rain, frost, wind and waves, and, occasionally, from the rising of the lake.