National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

> > > >
Color New!IIIF Color HighRes Gray HighRes PDF   Japanese English
0094 Southern Tibet : vol.9
Southern Tibet : vol.9 / Page 94 (Color Image)

New!Citation Information

doi: 10.20676/00000263
Citation Format: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR Text

 

 

ACROSS THE .VAKJIR PASS TO CHAKMAKTIN-KUL.

64

Afghan territories on the Pamirs 1895, Scale I :253)440 or i Inch = 4 Miles. I need not to say that the altitudes found with instruments of precision by the English surveyors are perfectly exact, whereas mine, which were found only by boiling-point thermometer and three aneroids, are too much dependent upon the atmospheric pressure for the time being, to be reliable. My altitude for Chakntaklin-kul, therefore, e. g. is more than I oo m. too high. My result was 4,114 m., whilst the English map gives only 3,993 m. It is only the stretch from Bozai-g-ombaz to Ak-task of my itinerary that can be checked by help of the English map. For this stretch Colonel BYSTRÖM has borrowed all the topographical detail and entered it on his map of my journey. He has done the same with the names, many of which are identical with those I heard.

However, we left Duldul-acltur and travelled down the valley of the Vakjirdarya. After a ride of one hour we passed a rabat consisting of two small stone huts and a cemetery. The place is called Chahr-lash. An hour westwards the schist falls 53° N. 30° W., and farther on 27° N. 30° W. The débris is granite and schist. We had only small brooks to cross, most of them in well eroded furrows. The bed of the main river is broad, and between its erosion terraces the river is divided into several branches. In spite of its width the bed is fairly deep-cut. From the edges of its terraces the soft grassy slopes gradually rise to the base of the black rocks. The glaciers decrease in size and number and finally come to an end. The place where we were nearest to the river was called Kur-uluk.

Around the last promontory from the mountains, to our right the road turns to the N. W., north and N. E. in more than a right angle. The river makes a sharp bend to the S. W., and is given the name Panj or Pändsh. Where the Vakjir valley joins the great valley in which the uppermost Ak-sit, the Chakntaktin-kul and the uppermost Pan] are situated, a wide, open plain is formed, at the N. W. side of which several tributary valleys enter. Our road does not proceed on the floor of the valley but sticks to the slopes of the mountains to our right at a considerable height above the valley. Here we soon enter a landscape of ravines between hills of loose, horizontally stratified clay, generally grey, but at one place red. Here and there the ground is swampy from springs. Approaching the lake one gets the impression of seeing a nearly flat water-parting in the valley; or rather, that S. W. of the S. W. end of the lake there is a hardly noticeable convexity of the clay ground separating the drainage area of the Ak-su from that of the Panj. From our road it was, however, difficult to tell whether such is the case or not, for we are still at a certain height above the floor of the valley. At that point of our road where one could think of a water-parting in the valley, I read a height of 4,151 m., or 37 m. above the surface of the lake. Some 8 km. from the S. W. end of the lake we passed a little brook from a tributary jilga to our right or S. E., which, divided