THE INFLUENCE OF THE HIMALAYAS 53
rienced in bringing water to the places where it is wanted is enormous. At Hardus, for instance, on the Dras River near the mouth of the Suru, we saw that a mountain stream had been diverted into a little canal and carried along the precipitous side of the valley for three or four miles at a height of over a thousand feet above the river. Far below, in some characteristically rocky fields, irrigated from another canal, women with baskets slung on their backs were laboriously gathering the stones which had worked up during the winter.
The glacial features of the upper part of the valley and the terraces of the middle both appear to owe their origin to the great series of climatic changes of which we have already found evidence in Kashmir. It is difficult to assign any date to the later changes on the basis of local evidence. The general freedom of the fronts of the glaciers among the lofty mountains from large amounts of detritus and the withdrawal of some of them from their moraines show that the glaciers are on the whole diminishing in size; this suggests that the climate is becoming warmer or drier. Workman, however, mentions the case of one glacier which has recently advanced, though the advance may be only temporary. He also mentions finding large trees lying dead at a height greater than that where even stunted trees now grow. Probably the trees are relics of the dry epoch during the first half of the Christian era, but this has not been proved. West of the pass of Fotu La, I later saw, at an elevation of 12,400 feet, the ruins of a village which was said to have been abandoned a few years ago because its springs dried up — another suggestion of change of climate. The
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