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| 0415 |
Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1 |
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—the direct action of water being substituted for the
under-cutting, which must, for extreme elevations, be
almost the only possible method of attack. One sees
even now throughout the mountains we traversed this
process constantly at work, producing thousands of land-
slides — a favourite sport of the spirits that inhabit
mountains geologically young—and particularly those
that are high enough to have their upper portions covered
all the year round, or for a long season. They change
watercourses and caravan routes, give birth to short-
lived lakes which burst their sudden bounds and mad-
deningly confuse the exposed strata.
Snow appears on the Kuen Lun range at an altitude
of about 14,500 feet, and at about 16,500 on the moun-
tains rising from the plateau, the level spaces of which,
in September and October, are substantially clear. The
light snowfalls, such as we experienced, were quickly
evaporated during the warmer hours of the day by the
fierce winds blowing quite regularly from the south-west,
and constituting one of the serious hardships of travel.
A great part of the whole plateau is therefore exposed
to direct erosion. The effect near the edges of the plain
is marked. In the interior, the water being of small
volume, the streams meander hither and thither, cur-
rent scarcely observable, and form shallow lakes which
hold for a time that small part of the flow which has not
been drunken by the thirsty sands. Such tremendous
action of the past, of which we found the witness above
described, has not, to my knowledge, been discussed by
other travellers. I am therefore the less confident in
theorising about it—yet suggest that, in spite of a prob-
ably constant precipitation of snow and rain, the summer-
volumes of these plateau streams may have been vastly
larger when the area above eighteen thousand feet was
much greater, thus permitting an accumulation of winter
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