country with high relative altitudes, with very steep, sometimes vertical, lines, a quite different landscape from the flat, denudated and levelled Chang-tang where the relative altitudes are insignificant and the lines chiefly horizontal. It is as if we already here had a presentiment of the approach of the Transhimalaya, with its very accentuated sculpture and its high rocky ranges.
Gyanyak-la itself is surrounded by innumerable small peaks, rocks and wild ridges cropping up from enormous masses of débris. Between and at the base of them, springs are often found. Just below the pass, the rocks consisted of greyish red dense Albien-limestone and red and pink dense Barrêmien-limestone. On the top of the pass, there is a cairn.
The way down , from the pass, that is on the top of a protuberance between two small valleys, which soon join, is very steep. We follow its ice bed, and finally turn to the S. E. until it joins the larger ice valley coming straight from the west. A little higher up in this valley, there are two tents. Just above the point where the joint brook pierces a steep limestone ridge in a very narrow gorge, our camp was pitched. The grass was fairly good but dung was scarce.
Already from the pass, one could guess that the valley going down from Camp LXXXVII was very narrow. On December r4th I went down some kilometers through this valley and found it to be a very wild gorge between nearly perpendicular mountain walls, as can be seen on Pan. 92, Tab. 15, and consisting of the same Barrêmien-limestone as before. So far as I went, or nearly 3 km., it did not change its character and was winding in all directions. At one place it was not quite one meter broad, and here the water is pressed together in the summer. At some places it is nearly closed by blocks and boulders that have fallen down. Still, a path is situated in this gorge. At two narrow passages it leaves the bottom of the gorge and traverses the hills at the sides. At one place the valley is a little wider, and there the grass is good. A travelling nomad had camped here with one or two horses. The whole gorge is a series of the wildest and most picturesque views. At the point where I turned back, the height was 4,798 m. So far as I went, the whole bottom of the valley was filled with ice, and at the narrowest places, there were ice-cascades, as clear as crystal; during the summer there must be small waterfalls. The highest of these cascades was l.s m. high. Here and there stones had fallen down on the ice, proving that the destruction of the rocks goes on continously. Some bends are very sharp around projecting pillars and pyramids. The colour is the usual pink or yellow. Such narrow passages as this, I had never seen on the Chang-lang plateau-land. But now we had reached a region that is not far from the peripheric mountain tracts.
The Tibetans we met at Canip LXXXVII, gave some information about the roads and names which as usual afterwards proved difficult to identify or control.
IIIFカラー高解像度
