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
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THE SOURCE OF THE YARKAND-DARYA AND THE SHAYOK.
603
can surely be few corners of the world which give such an impression of dreariness and utter desolation as this barren region of rocks and stones, which, moreover, during our entire sojourn was swept continuously by an icy wind and beaten upon by hail and sleet.»
On June I I the geologists made an excursion in the direction of the Tibetan plateaux, crossing a pass 6 i oo m. high and joining the basin of Taldat to the north
of Ling-si-tang. DE FILIPPI with other members of the expedition set out, on July 1, to explore the Indo-Asiatic watershed to the east of the Siachen Glacier. The Remo Glacier was found to be divided into two main branches which descend from their respective valleys to the north and west, and join almost at right angles. Some I o miles above the front they came to a large basin which receives from the north a tributary glacier nearly as large as the chief branches of the Remo. This tributary glacier proved to be of very great interest. A little above its junction with the main glacier, there flowed through a cleft in the mountain to the east a short and thick tongue, giving birth to a river which evidently did not belong to the basin of the Remo. Three days before, WOOD and his party had penetrated through a saddle to the west of the Kara-korum Pass into a large circus of confluent valleys which they identified as belonging to the basin of the Yarkand, and following up the river they had arrived at this particular point of the tributary glacier of the Remo Glacier. The surveys of both parties were thus connected in the most excellent way. Of this remarkable discovery DE FILIPPI says: »We had thus not only discovered the source of the Yarkand, hitherto erroneously marked on nearly every map as rising near the Karakoram Pass, but we had also ascertained this remarkable fact—that it flows from the same glacier which gives rise to the River Shyok.» J. W. HAYWARD had therefore made a mistake when he believed that he had discovered the source of the Yarkand-darya. He said : » On the afternoon of the 8th December I reached the source of the Yarkand Rivèr».I And I was mistaken when I wrote: »it seems very likely that HAYWARD discovered the source of the Yarkand-darya».2 For the small lake which HAYWARD in 1868 identified with the source of this river, DE FILIPPI found to be 20 miles further up the valley, »and to have practically no importance as regards the feeding of the river». YOUNGHUSBAND was indeed right in saying: »The most interesting purely geographical statement which Dr. DE FILIPPI made . . . was his account of the discovery of the source of the Yarkand River, and the remarkably interesting point that the same glacier which gives rise to the Yarkand River also gives birth to the Shyok River . . . so that while some of the water of this glacier goes off into Central Asia and buries itself eventually in the great desert of Gobi, the rest goes off south into the Indus and the Indian Ocean . . . That is
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I Cp. above p. 269. 2 Cp. above p. 271.
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