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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
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| 0073 |
Explorations in Turkestan : Expedition of 1904 : vol.2 |
Captions
| [Photo] 466 |
Manish Valley Terraces (in the Kopet Dagh Mountains) |
Citation Information
OCR Text
by the nine rivers—Ural, Chu, Syr, Zerafshan, Amu, Murg-ab, Tedjen, Atrek, and Kur—and the great flow of water brought in by the Volga, draining all of Eastern Russia, we must marvel at the degree of aridity signified by such a small area of water exceeding evaporation as that which survives in the Aral and Caspian—its two shrunken seas. Only half its larger rivers reach their seas at all, while the remainder with scores of other streams, by no means small, dwindle away on the plains, and others fail to reach even the plains, but die far up in the valleys they excavated when precipitation was heavier. Central-Asian hydrography is thus often the reverse of drainage systems in regions of ordinary rainfall familiar to most of us. Many of its rivers have the aspect of a drainage system reversed as they decrease in size downstream and finally split into distributaries resembling tributaries on the plain.
The evolution of a basin so large as the Aralo-Caspian can not be expected to have been through the cyclical uniformity followed by a small basin with a complete periphery of mountains. Indeed, it is so large that there is no surprise in finding that different portions entered from time to time into fairly independent series of changes, or developed in a way causally connected only in a broad sense.
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