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| 0040 |
Explorations in Turkestan : Expedition of 1904 : vol.2 |
Captions
| [Photo] 438 |
Springtime in the Alai Valley. |
Citation Information
OCR Text
23,000 feet in height, it creeps fast down upon the grass. Ere spring has finished
bloom, winter has come and the valley is left frozen in snowbound emptiness.
But, though it is a remarkably rich pasture, there is scarcely rain enough—
too little over the western or lower part. It is to the shortness of summer and
relatively heavy snow of winter that the richness of its grass steppes must be
attributed. There is enough water from melted snow in the ground to keep things
fresh with the occasional help of mountain mists; enough in the upper half and
all is full green there when winter falls to bury it, but in the lower half, the sun
dries out all the water and leaves a plain of parched grass.
The Alai valley is thus a semi-arid type of desert basin. Of all the basins
to be considered by us, it is unique in that it yields four of the deposition zones,
so interwoven and interlapping that alluvium, moraine, and loess are found one
over the other, and correlation becomes relatively easy. Kettle-hole pools are
found on its widespread moraines, but they do not belong, organically speaking,
in the lacustrian division of a desert basin; so that the lacustrian zone is here
lacking. But the alluvial, flying sands, loess, and glacial zones are all especially
well represented. Its nuclei of dunes, though small, are not very disproportion-
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