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
TERRACES EAST OF TSO-NYAK.
I
527
for one moment attribute to the existing little brook, even making allowance for its summer highwater. It is clearly from the same period also that the side-terraces date; and it is noteworthy that they have been built up with especial distinctness at the elbow on the right side of the valley, where the full force of the current spends itself, There too the rocky walls are precipitous, whereas on the opposite or left side they slope gently down to the bottom of the valley. From that point the terraces continue all the way down to Drugub, growing larger and more distinctly defined as they proceed, so much so indeed that they not seldom constitute the peculiar and salient feature of the landscape.'
Just a little above the point where the Drugub river joins the Shayok, there is at the right side of the latter a strikingly developed erosion terrace or rather two terraces, of which I have two photos on p. 398 of Vol IV, Scientific Results, and a third opposite p. 400.
It is not only in the brook of Drugub, in the Shayok and Chang-chenmo and other tributaries in this region that gigantic remains have been left from a time when enormous quantities of water flowed down through these valleys. Such monuments, though on a smaller scale, are also to be found in valleys through which flow brooks which are affluents to the Tso-nyak, and thus ultimately to Panggong-tso.
My Camp CXXXIII (1901) is at a distance of 7o km. east of Tso-nyak.2 Half a day's march east of that Camp there were unmistakable traces of an old dried-up lake in the great latitudinal valley. South and S. E. of the Camp was a well-defined terrace, 4 or 5 m, high (Cf. photo p. 2 54, Vol. IV, Scient. Results). The altitude of the camp was 4597 m., while the next camp to the west, Camp CXXXIV, was at 4587 m. In travelling here I wrote: The whole of the lower part of the slope looks as if it had been shorn away. It is not, however, continuous, but is sometimes interrupted by recently formed gravelly screes. Yet even the bigger screes that block the outlets of the transverse glens have been cut through in a similar manner, proving that the sedimentary matter which has been washed down across the scree since the shearing took place, has not been sufficient to cover over and obliterate the old terrace, which was formed at a time when the climate was wetter than it is now. During the succeeding day's march the shearing was even more pronounced. This is, I have no doubt, the last trace of the effluent from the lake, which, as a consequence of the configuration of the ground, crept close in to the southern base of the range, where its erosive activity gave rise to the terrace in question, and at an earlier epoch, where there was a copious inflow into the lake, the erosive energy of its effluent
I Scientific Results, Vol. IV, p. 35o.
2 This name seems doubtful. I only heard the name Tso-ngombo, »The blue lake», for the resh-water basins. It may, however, serve to point out which particular basin of Tso-ngombo I mean.
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