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0084 The Pulse of Asia : vol.1
アジアの鼓動 : vol.1
The Pulse of Asia : vol.1 / 84 ページ(カラー画像)

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doi: 10.20676/00000233
引用形式選択: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR読み取り結果

away at the beginning of the Christian era, and was the
time indicated in the legend when Kashmir was too cold to
be inhabited, except in summer, by nomads. Even to-day
the snowfall of Kashmir is so great that agriculture can-
not be carried on at an elevation of much over 7000 feet;
and on the plain itself, at an elevation of from 5000 to 6000
feet, early snows sometimes cause disaster by destroying
the rice crop. It would need but a slight increase in cold or
in snowfall to render the whole country unfit for agriculture
and habitable only for nomadic shepherds, who would drive
their flocks southward in winter, away from the snow, to
the warm, low plain beyond the mountains. Such we may
reasonably believe to have been the condition of Kashmir
before it appears in history near the opening of the Chris-
tian era.

By the sixth or seventh centuries of that era, as history
shows, Kashmir had acquired nearly its present prosperous
character, and not long after was suffering from the filling
of the channel of the Jhelum with detritus from the moun-
tains, and the consequent expansion of the lakes. Such pros-
perity and such disaster would naturally result from a rela-
tively dry or warm epoch like that which appears to have
occurred during the first six or eight centuries of the Chris-
tian era. On the one hand, agriculture would be stimulated,
and on the other, fans of boulders and gravel would be
deposited in the river bed, causing the lake to rise, and
perhaps to submerge villages.

As to the possible succeeding mediæval epoch of some-
what lower temperature and greater rainfall, there is little
to be said. The deepening of the channel of the Jhelum and