Kashmir, described by Sir Francis Younghusband, painted by Major E. Molyneux

by Sir Francis Edward Younghusband

THE STORY OF THE MOUNTAINS

How these peaks and mountain ranges arose is a fascinating and impressive study. It has been made by Mr. Hayden, who, in the fourth part of the scientific memoir quoted in the previous chapter, has compiled their history from his own personal investigations and the accounts of his fellow-observers in the Geological Survey of India. And surely a scientific man could have no more inspiring task than the unravelling of the past history of the mighty Himalaya. Here we have clue after clue traced down, the meaning of each extracted, and the broad general outline of the mountain's story told in all its grand impressiveness, till one sees the earth pulsating like a living being, rising and subsiding, and rising again, now sinking inward till the sea flows over the depression, then rising into continental areas, anon subsiding again beneath the waters, and finally, under titanic lateral pressure and crustal compression, corrugating into mighty folds, while vast masses of granite well up from below, force their way through, lift up the pre-existing rocks and toss themselves upward into the final climax of the great peaks which distinguish the Himalaya from every other range of mountains in the world.

For millions of years a perpetual struggle has been going on between the inherent earth forces pressing upward and the opposing forces of denudation wearing away the surface. Sometimes the internal forces are in commotion, or the contracting crust of the earth finds some weak spot and crumples upward, and the mountains win. A period of internal quiescence follows, and the rain and snow, the frost and heat, gain the victory, and wear down the proudest mountains—as they have worn away the snowy glacier mountains which once stood in Rajputana.

RAMPUR, JHELUM VALLEY ROAD

Of all this wonderful past the mountains themselves bear irrefutable evidence. Near Rampur, on the road into Kashmir, are bold cliffs of limestone, a rock which is merely the accumulation of the relics of generations of minute marine shell-fishes. These cliffs, now upturned to almost the perpendicular, must once have lain flat beneath the surface of the ocean. High up in the Sind valley, embedded in the rocks, are fossil oysters, showing that they too must once have lain beneath the sea. More telling still at Zewan, a few miles east of Srinagar, are fossils of land plants immediately below strata of rocks containing fossils of marine animals and plants, from which may be concluded that the land subsided under the sea, and was afterwards thrust up again. Again, an examination of the rocks on the Takht-i-Suliman shows that they are merely dried lava, and must have had a volcanic origin—perhaps beneath the sea. And an investigation of the rocks on the flanks of Nanga Parbat has shown that they are of granite which must have been intruded from the interior of the earth.

Everywhere there is evidence that even K² and Nanga Parbat lay beneath the sea, and that where now are mountains once rolled the ocean; that some once lay in soft, flat layers of mud or sand, or plant and shell deposit on the ocean bottom, while others, as the ocean bottom was upraised above the waters, were obtruded through them; and that everywhere there has been an immense pressing and crumpling of the earth's crust—a rising and subsiding, a throbbing and pulsation, which at one time has brought Kashmir in direct contact by land with Madagascar and South Africa, and at another has brought it into through communication by sea with both America and Europe; and which, finally, has projected it upward thousands of feet into the air. The evidence, moreover, shows that millions of years have passed while these titanic movements have been working out their marvellous results.

Who can but be impressed by such ages and such forces? Who that looks on those lovely Kashmir mountains, and on the mighty peaks which rise behind, and has learnt their long eventful history, can help being impressed by the immensity of time their structure betokens, by the magnitude of the movements unceasingly at work within, and by the dignity with which they yet present a front so impassive and so sublime?