At a fork of the valley several miles above Yeumtong, and below the great glacier of Chango Khang, the ancient moraines are prodigious, much exceeding any I have elsewhere seen, both in extent, in the size of the boulders, and in the height to which the latter are piled on one another. Many boulders I measured were twenty yards across, and some even forty; and the chaotic scene they presented baffles all description: they were scantily clothed with stunted silver firs.
Beyond this, the path crosses the river, and ascends rapidly over a mile of steeply sloping landslip, composed of angular fragments of granite, that are constantly falling from above, and are extremely dangerous. At 14,000 feet, trees and shrubs cease, willow and honeysuckle being the last; and thence onward the valley is bleak, open, and stony, with lofty rocky mountains on either side. The south wind brought a cold drizzling rain, which numbed us, and two of the lads who had last come up from Dorjiling were seized with a remittent fever, originally contracted in the hot valleys; luckily we found some cattle-sheds, in which I left them, with two men to attend on them.
Momay Samdong is situated in a broad part of the Lachoong valley, where three streams meet; it is on the west of Chango Khang, and is six miles south-east of Kinchinjhow, and seven south-west of Donkia: it is in the same latitude as Palung, but scarcely so lofty. The mean of fifty-six barometrical observations contemporaneous with Calcutta makes it 15,362 feet above the sea; nearly the elevation of Lacheepia (near the Tunkra pass), from which, however, its scenery and vegetation entirely differ.
I pitched my tent close to a little shed, at the gently sloping base of a mountain that divided the Lachoong river from a western tributary. It was a wild and most exposed spot: long stony mountains, grassy on the base near the river; distant snowy peaks, stupendous precipices, moraines, glaciers, transported boulders, and rocks rounded by glacial action, formed the dismal landscape which everywhere met the view. There was not a bush six inches high, and the only approach to woody plants were minute creeping willows and dwarf rhododendrons, with a very few prostrate junipers and Ephedra.
The base of the spur was cut into broad flat terraces, composed of unstratified sand, pebbles, and boulders; the remains, doubtless, of an enormously thick glacial deposit. The terracing is as difficult to be accounted for in this valley as in that of Yangma (East Nepal); both valleys being far too broad, and descending too rapidly to admit of the hypothesis of their having been blocked up in the lower part, and the upper filled with large lakes.* [The formation of small lakes, however, between moraines and the sides of the valleys they occupy, or between two successively formed moraines (as I have elsewhere mentioned), will account for very extensive terraced areas of this kind; and it must be borne in mind that when the Momay valley was filled with ice, the breadth of its glacier at this point must have been twelve miles, and it must have extended east and west from Chango Khang across the main valley, to beyond Donkia. Still the great moraines are wanting at this particular point, and though atmospheric action and the rivers have removed perhaps 200 feet of glacial shingle, they can hardly have destroyed a moraine of rocks, large enough to block up the valley.] Another tributary falls into the Lachoong at Momay, which leads eastwards up to an enormous glacier that descends from Donkia. Snowy mountains rise nearly all round it: those on its south and east divide Sikkim from the Phari province in Tibet; those on the north terminate in a forked or cleft peak, which is a remarkable and conspicuous feature from Momay. This, which I have called forked Donkia,* [Its elevation by my observations is about 21,870 feet.] is the termination of a magnificent amphitheatre of stupendous snow-clad precipices, continuously upwards of 20,000 feet high, that forms the east flank of the upper Lachoong. From Donkia top again, the mountains sweep round to the westward, rising into fingered peaks of extraordinary magnificence; and thence —still running west—dip to 18,500 feet, forming the Donkia pass, and rise again as the great mural mass of Kinchinjhow. This girdle of mountains encloses the head waters of the Lachoong, which rises in countless streams from its perpetual snows, glaciers, and small lakes: its north drainage is to the Cholamoo lakes in Tibet; in which is the source of the Lachen, which flows round the north base of Kinchinjhow to Kongra Lama.
The bottom of the Lachoong valley at Momay is broad, tolerably level, grassy, and covered with isolated mounds and ridges that point down the valley, and are the remains of glacial deposits. It dips suddenly below this, and some gneiss rocks that rise in its centre are remarkably moutonneed or rounded, and have boulders perched on their summits. Though manifestly rounded and grooved by ancient glaciers, I failed to find scratches on these weather-worn rocks.* [I have repeatedly, and equally in vain, sought for scratchings on many of the most conspicuously moutonneed gneiss rocks of Switzerland. The retention of such markings depends on other circumstances than the mere hardness of the rock, or amount of aqueous action. What can be more astonishing than to see these most delicate scratches retained in all their sharpness on rocks clothed with seaweed and shells, and exposed at every tide, in the bays of western Scotland!]
The Lachoong is here twelve or fifteen yards wide, and runs over a pebbly bed, cutting a shallow channel through the deposits, down to the subjacent rock, which is in some cases scooped out six or eight feet deep by its waters. I do not doubt that the flatness of the floor of the Momay valley is caused by the combined action of the streams that drained the three glaciers which met here; for the tendency of retiring glaciers is to level the floors of valleys, by giving an ever-shifting direction to the rivers which drain them, and which spread detritus in their course. Supposing these glaciers to have had no terminal moraines, they might still have forced immense beds of gravel into positions that would dam up lakes between the ice and the flanks of the valleys, and thus produce much terracing on the latter.* [We are still very ignorant of many details of ice action, and especially of the origin of many enormous deposits which are not true moraines. These, so conspicuous in the lofty Himalayan valleys, are not less so in those of the Swiss Alps: witness that broad valley in which Grindelwald village is situated, and which is covered to an immense depth with angular detritus, moulded into hills and valleys; also the whole broad open Upper Rhone valley, above the village of Munster, and below that of Obergestelen. The action of broad glaciers on gentle slopes is to raise their own beds by the accumulation of gravel which their lower surface carries and pushes forward. I have seen small glaciers thus raised 300 feet; leaving little doubt in my mind that the upper Himalayan valleys were thus choked with deposit 1000 feet thick, of which indeed the proofs remain along the flanks of the Yangma valley. The denuding and accumulating effects of ice thus give a contour to mountain valleys, and sculpture their flanks and floors far more rapidly than sea action, or the elements. After a very extensive experience of ice in the Antarctic ocean, and in mountainous countries, I cannot but conclude that very few of our geologists appreciate the power of ice as a mechanical agent, which can hardly be over-estimated, whether as glacier, iceberg, or pack ice, heaping shingle along coasts.We are still very ignorant of many details of ice action, and especially of the origin of many enormous deposits which are not true moraines. These, so conspicuous in the lofty Himalayan valleys, are not less so in those of the Swiss Alps: witness that broad valley in which Grindelwald village is situated, and which is covered to an immense depth with angular detritus, moulded into hills and valleys; also the whole broad open Upper Rhone valley, above the village of Munster, and below that of Obergestelen. The action of broad glaciers on gentle slopes is to raise their own beds by the accumulation of gravel which their lower surface carries and pushes forward. I have seen small glaciers thus raised 300 feet; leaving little doubt in my mind that the upper Himalayan valleys were thus choked with deposit 1000 feet thick, of which indeed the proofs remain along the flanks of the Yangma valley. The denuding and accumulating effects of ice thus give a contour to mountain valleys, and sculpture their flanks and floors far more rapidly than sea action, or the elements. After a very extensive experience of ice in the Antarctic ocean, and in mountainous countries, I cannot but conclude that very few of our geologists appreciate the power of ice as a mechanical agent, which can hardly be over-estimated, whether as glacier, iceberg, or pack ice, heaping shingle along coasts.]
On our arrival, we found that a party of buxom, good-natured looking girls who were tending yaks, were occupying the hut, which, however, they cheerfully gave up to my people, spreading a black tent close by for themselves; and next morning they set off with all their effects packed upon the yaks. The ground was marshy, and covered with cowslips, Ranunculus, grasses and sedges, Cyananthus, blue asters, gentians, etc. The spot appearing highly favourable for observations, I determined to remain here during the equinoctial month, and put my people on "two-thirds allowance," i.e., four pounds of rice daily for three men, allowing them to send down the valley to cater for what more they could get. The Singtam Soubah was intensely disgusted with my determination: he accompanied me next day to the pass, and having exhausted his persuasions, threats, and warnings about snow, wind, robbers, starvation, and Cheen sepoys, departed on the 12th for Yeumtong, leaving me truly happy for the first time since quitting Dorjiling. I had now a prospect of uninterruptedly following up my pursuits at an elevation little below that of the summit of Mont Blanc, surrounded by the loftiest mountains, and perhaps the vastest glaciers on the globe; my instruments were in perfect order, and I saw around me a curious and varied flora.
The morning of the 9th of September promised fair, though billowy clouds were rapidly ascending the valley. To the eastward my attention was directed to a double rainbow; the upper was an arch of the usual form, and the lower was the curved illuminated edge of a bank of cumulus, with the orange hues below. We took the path to the Donkia pass, fording the river, and ascending in a north-east direction, along the foot of stony hills that rise at a gradual slope of 12 degrees to broad unsnowed ridges, 18,000 to 19,000 feet high. Shallow valleys, glacier-bound at their upper extremities, descend from the still loftier rearward mountains; and in these occur lakes. About five miles up, a broad opening on the west leads to Tomo Chamo, as the eastern summit of Kinchinjhow is called.* [On one occasion I ascended this valley, which is very broad, flat, and full of lakes at different elevations; one, at about 17,000 feet elevation is three-quarters of a mile long, but not deep: no water-plants grew in it, but there were plenty of others round its margin. I collected, in the dry bed of a stream near it, a curious white substance like thick felt, formed of felspathic silt (no doubt the product of glacial streams) and the siliceous cells of infusoriae. It much resembles the fossil or meteoric paper of Germany, which is also formed of the lowest tribes of fresh-water plants, though considered by Ehrenberg as of animal origin. A vein of granite in the bottom of the valley had completely altered the character of the gneiss, which contained veins of jasper and masses of amorphous garnet. Much olivine is found in the fissures of the gneiss: this feral is very rare in Sikkim, but I have also seen it in the fissures of the White gneissy granite of the surrounding heights.] Above this the valley expands very much, and is stony and desert: stupendous mountains, upwards of 21,000 feet high, rear themselves on all sides, and the desolation and grandeur of the scene are unequalled in my experience. The path again crosses the river (which is split into many channels), and proceeds northwards, over gravelly terraces and rocks with patches of Scotch alpine grasses (Festuca ovina and Poa laxa), sedges, Stipa, dandelion, Allardia, gentians, Saussurea, and Astraga1us, varied with hard hemispherical mounds of the alsineous plant mentioned at chapter xxi.
I passed several shallow lakes at 17,500 feet; their banks were green and marshy, and supported thirty or forty kinds of plants. At the head of the valley a steep rocky crest, 500 feet high, rises between two precipitous snowy peaks, and a very fatiguing ascent (at this elevation) leads to the sharp rocky summit of the Donkia pass, 18,466 feet above the sea by barometer, and 17,866 by boiling-point. The view on this occasion was obscured by clouds and fogs, except towards Tibet, in which direction it was magnificent; but as I afterwards twice ascended this pass, and also crossed it, I shall here bring together all the particulars I noted.