| From Tok-jonsung our road proceeds south-westwards on the top of the ter- race and at some distance from the river. The panorama of sharp peaks with eternal snow and glaciers becomes more and more fascinating as one approaches. Once more the road touches two very sharp bends of the Chema-yundung. It is surprising to find such a slow current at so short a distance from the mountains. Sometimes the river is more like a series of lakelets or basins with hardly any visible current at all. From a distance the river therefore looks much larger than it is. At some places in the bed there are transverse thresholds of gravel, and over them the water forms rapids. The volume I estimated at 4 or 5 cub. In. a second, before noon, and before the high-water of the day had reached so far. No tributaries were seen on the day's march. The valley is here very wide and flat; the river flows along the foot of the reddish rocks at its left, or northern side; to the S. E. of our route the country is hilly. No animals are seen except rabbits and ravens. The snow-mountains to the W.S.W. are called Chema-yundung-pu, and from them the river is said to come down. To the N. 30° W. one sees the opening of the comparatively narrow valley from which the river comes and makes its entrance on the valley-plain we are just crossing. The road now enters a labyrinth of low, rounded hills of sand, gravel and blocks of all sizes, without any kind of vegetation. They are old moraines, often stretching as rounded, but fairly steep ridges to the N. E. There are some semicircular moraine-walls with depressions inside, which obviously become filled with water after rain. Only one of them now contained a little moraine-lake called Tso-täri, about I oo m. across. The moraine-belt soon comes to an end, and is followed by slowly rising steppes with grass on sand and clay. Shäryak, Camp 199, is at 4,874 In. (15,986 feet) near the mouth of a valley coming from the S.W., and with a broad bed of grey gravel without water. The living rock is here granite, quartzitic sandstone, fine-grained sandstone, and pyroxenite. On July I I th the journey was continued direct S. W. The more we approached the northern foot of the mountains, the earlier in the day the strong S. W. wind used to set in, and the harder and more piercing the wind became. Ryder and Rawling had hard wind in the winter on their road over Ailaryum-la and so was the case with Father Desideri. At Camp 200 we came across several rather large sheets of fine thin bark, light as paper, which had obviously been carried away by the S. W. winds over the mountains from their homes on the southern side of the Himalayas. The Tibetans were quite accustomed to see such sheets of bark, and said the trees from which they came formed forests round a place called Mogum. However, this transport of solid material over the Himalaya is a proof of rather strong winds from the south. Our road goes up the Shäryak valley rising slowly between low hills. Gravel and blocks of granite are seen, but no living rock is passed the whole clay. There is some grass and moss in the valley, but its sides are arid. Here and there snow patches | |
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