National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

of Central Asia's valley terraces have resulted from widespread cycles of uplift,
in some parts locally interrupted, and that just such a variable glaciology would
arise from a differential uplift.

THE ZERAFSHAN AS A LONGITUDINAL VALLEY.

The Zerafshan valley is perhaps the most valuable of longitudinal valleys
for our purpose. Rising in the ice cave of its wonderful glacier, amid Alpine peaks
up to 18,000 feet in height, at the forking of two westernmost members of the
Tian Shan system, its river flows west for 150 miles as a thundering torrent, between
the rock walls of its canyon carved in the bottom of a gorge several thousand
feet in depth. Out of this it abruptly emerges onto the broad steppes, to nourish
the great oasis of Samarkand and
those bordering it for 200 miles,
till the last of its waters filter away
in the gardens and rice-fields of old
Bokhara. Once it probably joined
the Oxus and only about a thousand
years ago filled the canals of Pai-
kent, then the most powerful city
of Central Asia, but now aban-
doned to the desert dunes, from
which project its ruined walls. As
a longitudinal and structural valley
that of the upper Zerafshan has
responded to uplift differently from
those carved transversely in up-
lifted ranges. To begin with, it
could not much feel any transverse
tilting such as so affected the Taldic
valley to the east and, since it de-
bouches from between the ends of
two ranges where they die out and
seem to have risen but little, it
responded slowly up the 150 miles
to its source. Moreover, there is more chance for a warp in a long valley than
in a short one. Lastly, the grade of such a long longitudinal valley is necessarily
much less than that of transverse valleys heading at the same height on the
same range. It therefore had more tendency to fill with the waste of glacial
alluviation, especially during long interruptions of crustal movement when aggra-
dation of the plains could raise the base-level back upstream, either case giving
rise to massive terraces of alluvium after the cutting-down of a succeeding uplift.
All the above distinctions are characteristic of the Zerafshan as well as the
Kizil Su gorge of Karategin. In general, there seem to have been three cycles
of erosion before the present, which makes a fourth, as the stream is now rapidly
corrading.