MOUNTAIN MISTS
This, as it happens, was an interesting period in the earth's history. For there occurred about then, or somewhat earlier, an extensive upheaval in many parts of the world, and mountains which have been now removed were upheaved to an altitude comparable with that of the highest ranges of the present day, and in the Punjab there then existed a snowy range with glaciers.
It was at this period that Kashmir was joined with the mainland of the Indian peninsula, which in its turn was joined with Africa, and now, at least, there must have been some vegetation and animal life. At this time of the Coal Measures—the remnants of forests growing in shallow sea-water—life was well advanced. Birds and mammals and flowers, and the more highly developed animals and plants had not yet appeared, but in the sea lived such things as star-fishes, shell-fishes, corals, sea-urchins, sea-lilies, sea-cucumbers, feather stars, sea-worms, sea-snails, cuttlefish, water-fleas and mussels, shrimps, and lobsters and fishes. In the coal swamps were ferns, "horse-tails" similar to the horse-tails of the present day, but of gigantic size, club mosses more than fifty feet high, lycopods, trees with trunks fifty feet high, and which bore catkins ripening into berries not unlike those of yews. In the fresh water were some shell-fishes, crustaceans, and fishes. On land were spiders, scorpions, some of gigantic size, and centipedes. Through the air flew hundreds of different kinds of insects, May flies, cockroaches, crickets, and beetles. The magnate of the vertebrate world was the labyrinthodont (traces of which have been found in Kashmir), which had a salamander-like body, a long tail, bony plates to protect his head, and armour of integumentary scales to protect his body. Of land trees and plants there were lepidodendrons with huge stems clad with linear leaves and bearing cones; huge club mosses, climbing palms, such as grow in tropical forests of the present day, great funguses, and numerous ferns.
Such was the type of vegetation and of land and sea animal life of the Coal period, and although not many remains of this age have yet been found in Kashmir, enough traces have been discovered to satisfy us that in the shallow estuarial water and on the islands of the inland sea there lived an animal and vegetable life which must have been very similar to what we know existed elsewhere.
NEAR THE KOLAHOI GLACIER, LIDAR VALLEY
For another fourteen million years or so after the Coal period there is nothing special to record in the history of Kashmir. There may have been a line of islands along the core of the present ranges, but the greater part of Kashmir had sunk once more beneath the waters, in which new sediments to enormous thickness were being accumulated, till in the late Cretaceous period, or about four million years ago, the great crustal compression began which finally upheaved these deposits from the ocean bottom, and formed the Kashmir of the present day. This upheaval was, however, neither sudden nor continuous. It was very gradual, it had three distinct phases, and was not complete till a million years ago when the dividing ocean entirely disappeared, and the Himalaya reached its maximum height.