Southern Tibet : vol.7 / 488 ページ（白黒高解像度画像）

0488	Southern Tibet : vol.7
南チベット : vol.7

0488

Southern Tibet : vol.7

南チベット : vol.7

not know Prshevalskiy's discoveries and great parts of his central Kwen-lun were
merely hypothetical, and his theories have, in many details, since then proved to
be wrong.

Considerable length, old age and homogenity are the principal characteristics
of this system. Geologically it is independent, and the foldings of later epochs have
not influenced it. In China, south of the Kwen-lun, the S. W. to N. E. stretching
folds never cross it or form knots with it, but avoid it, as it were, turning E. N. E.
and east, leaving it alone. On the northern side the N. E. stretching folds turn to
the west. All folds in its neighbourhood have been formed after the upheaval of the
Kwen-lun. Richthofen regards this system as one of the oldest features in the building
up of the earth's crust.

In the east it is the mere ruin of an originally much higher mountain. The
peaks have disappeared, only the great bulk or mass of the system is left. The
peaks may have been much higher than those of the much younger Himalaya.

Even the name Kwen-lun is one of the very oldest in eastern Asia, dating
from the mythical history of China. Later on it is generally said that the Kwen-lun
was situated near the sources of the Yellow River. During the Han dynasty the
myth arose that the source of this river was situated south of Khotan, from where
the river went to Lop-nor, and thence flowed underground to reappear in the Hsing-
su-hai or Star sea, where Prshevalskiy found, if not its real source, at least
something very nearly approaching it.¹ Thus Kwen-lun was regarded as partly south
of Odontala. The name Kulkun, or Kurkun of Mongolian extraction, is much younger
and has to disappear from modern maps.

Richthofen divides the Kwen-lun into three parts, of which he regards the
western, between 76 and 89°, as a single, but broad, range. In its central part the
system becomes very broad. The eastern or Chinese part we do not need to con-
sider. Humboldt was the first to understand the orographical importance of the
Kwen-lun. But he was wrong in connecting it with the Hindu-kush and making it
continue as one range the whole way to Asia Minor, as the ancients had done. He
regarded it as the water-parting between the Tarim and the Indus. Ritter adopted
his views. Both placed a plateau-land between the Himalaya and the Kwen-lun. They
could not suspect the existence of a tremendous mountain system between these two
boundary systems. These appeared only by and by in the course of continued ex-
ploration. It was, as I have mentioned above, the merit of the Schlagintweits
to have proved that the Kara-korum was a separate system, independent of the

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