IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Southern Tibet : vol.7 |
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Citation Information
ROBERT SHAW.
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262
Kara-korum would never have been called a range, had it not been the divide of
two important basins.
He concludes that Saunders' view would be correct if it had been said that
the water-parting was situated on the plateau, and that the boundaries of the plateau, Kwen-lun and Muz-tagh, were broken through by the rivers rising on the plateau. »My protest (in which I should have expected Mr. Saunders support) is raised against the practice of tracing out on the map a line dividing the headwaters of the streams belonging to separate basins and then assuming that along that line, and there only,
runs a range.»
On the Kara-koramm mountains was the title of an article in which SAUNDERS
answered SHAW.' Here he proves that the name Mus-tagh should not be used instead of Kara-korum, which belongs to the whole system. Shaw's Eastern Mus-tag he prefers to treat as a secondary feature, whereas the water-parting is the main axis of the system. Saunders' Kara-korum Range terminates at the head of the Kara-
kash River.
It should be remembered that the eastern end of the Kara-koram lies between the headwaters of the Karakash and those which feed the lakes and swamps of the Lingzethung Plain, where the Gangri system begins. It is the connection of the Gangri system with the Karakoram that Mr. Shaw is invited to solve, so as to connect his Mustak with it in a symmetrical manner.
It was a mistake of the time and a mistake which existed still in i 9 i o that one could talk at all of the eastern end of the Kara-korum. And it is absurd to call the Lingzitang a kind of boundary mark between the Kara-korum and the Gangri System, 1. e. Transhimalaya. Still, it is a very sound and clever thought Saunders expressed in putting up as a desideratum the settling of the question whether or not the Transhimalaya is connected with the Kara-korum. This is indeed the case with the southern Kara-korum, whereas the northern is connected with the Tang-la.
Shaw again replies.2 He defends his views and proves that the Kara-korum cannot possibly be at the same time the name of the water-parting on the plateau, and of the range which is the south-western boundary of that plateau.
If Mr. Saunders desires a systematic nomenclature for the actual facts of that region, I offer him the Karakoram plateau (a subdivision of the Tibetan plateau), bounded by the Kuen-lun range on the north-east, and by the Eastern Murtà.k on the south-west, both of which are penetrated by the streams rising on the plateau on either side of the Karakoram water-parting which is in places marked by a ridge and in places unmarked and almost imperceptible on the open plains of the table-land. How and where the south-western boundary range and the water-parting coalesce further east in the Gangri range, which
I Geographical Magazine. Vol. V. 18 7 8, p. 2 0.
2 The Kara-koram. Geographical Magazine. Vol. V. i 8 7 8, p. 126.
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