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0059 The Pulse of Asia : vol.1
The Pulse of Asia : vol.1 / Page 59 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000233
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22   THE PULSE OF ASIA

pare at the " dak bungalows " where we spent the nights. We had not been able to find a satisfactory servant to act as interpreter, so we talked by signs much of the time, and found it surprisingly easy.

Kashmir is an excellent example of a kind of warped basin found in many parts of the world. It is like an elliptical tray, a hundred miles long from southeast to northwest and forty or fifty wide. The rim consists of the front and middle ranges of the Himalayas, which merge at either end. The slopes of individual mountains are very steep, but the rim as a whole is about two miles high and ten times as wide. During the course of ages, the bottom of the tray has been warped downward and the rim has been warped up. The Jhelum River has sometimes, perhaps, been checked by the rising rim; and the lower part of the tray has been converted into a lake. In general, however, the river has been able to cut its way across the gradually rising mountains just as a circular saw cuts its way into a piece of wood thrust against it. The result is the deep gorge of the Jhelum, the peculiar course of which to the southwest of Kashmir appears on the map. The gorge is so narrow and impassable in its lower portion that the famous Murree road, the chief exit from Kashmir, is obliged to leave it and climb five thousand feet over a pass in order to reach Rawal Pindi, a few miles west of the point where the river emerges on the main plain of India. While the Jhelum has been cutting its gorge, the basin of Kashmir has been receiving vast deposits of gravel and silt, brought down by the numerous swift streams from the mountains, and deposited on the flat basin floor to a depth of hundreds or thousands of