But the most serious source of uncertainty in the measurement of the altitude of a peak is the refraction of the atmosphere. A ray of light from a peak to an observer's eye does not travel along a straight line, but assumes a curved path concave to the earth. The ray enters the observer's eye—I quote from Colonel Burrard—in a direction tangential to the curve at that point, and this is the direction in which the observer sees the peak. It makes the peak appear too high. This refraction is greatest in the morning and evening, and least in the middle of the day; it is different in summer from what it is in winter. One of the great Himalayan peaks visible from the plains of India would appear, from observations with a theodolite made to it from the plains, to fall 500 feet between sunrise and the afternoon, and to rise again 300 feet before sunset; and even in the afternoon, when it would appear lowest, it would still be too high by perhaps 700 feet. This is obviously a very fruitful source of error, and the difficulty of determining the error is increased by the fact that the curvature of the ray varies with the rarefaction of the atmosphere. In the higher altitude, when the rarefaction of the atmosphere increases, the ray assumes a less curved path. All these possible sources of error due to the rarefaction of the atmosphere have been most carefully studied, but even now we must allow 10 to 30 feet as possible error due to the rarefaction of the atmosphere.

Being more accessible than the remote K² the observations for its height were made at much closer quarters, the nearest observation point being 43 miles distant instead of 61 as in the case of K². It was observed in all from eleven different points, of which the most remote was 133 miles. But until it had been measured by the Survey it had been marked on maps as only 19,000 feet.

Colonel Burrard says it is "the most isolated and perhaps the most imposing of all the peaks of Asia." It certainly is remarkable for its isolation. With the exception of subordinate pinnacles rising from its own buttresses, no peak within 60 miles of it attains an altitude of more than 17,000 feet. Throughout a circle of 120 miles' diameter Nanga Parbat surpasses all other summits by more than 9000 feet. And its upper 5000 feet are precipitous. It stands out therefore in solitary nobleness, and it can be seen on its northern side rising 23,000 feet from the Indus, there only 3500 above the sea. But whether it is of all mountains the really most imposing it is not easy to say, and personally I almost cling to Kinchinjunga. Rakaposhi in Hunza, which is 25,550 feet in altitude, and can be seen rising sheer up from the Hunza River 5000 feet above sea-level, is also wonderfully impressive. There is a peak on the Pamirs 25,146 feet high which can be seen rising abruptly from the plains of Turkestan, which are but a little over 3000 feet; and there is the Musherbrum Peak near K² which is 25,660 feet—all of which I have seen, and which I find it hard to place exactly in order of relative impressiveness. But if Nanga Parbat cannot be placed in unquestionably the first position, it will in most men's estimation approximate to it, and must in any case be reckoned among the few most striking sights in the world.

Of what are these great peaks built up? No one has yet ascended their summits, and as Mr. Hayden points out, the geologist has to do his work at close quarters, and not like the surveyor from a distance. So the composition of the highest peaks is rarely known in any detail, though the general character of the rocks can be ascertained with a fair approximation to certainty, from observation of material on the flanks, and from a distant view of the weathering character and apparent structure of the peaks themselves. From such observations it has been found that almost all the peaks of 25,000 feet or more in height are composed of granite, gneiss, and associated crystalline rocks. It had long be supposed that some of the granites found on the flanks of the great peaks which presented a foliated appearance were of sedimentary origin, and had therefore been once deposited beneath the sea. But their truly intrusive nature was recognised by the late Lieutenant-General M'Mahon, who proved conclusively that the great central gneissose rock of the Himalayas was in reality a granite crushed and foliated by pressure. It may certainly be taken that both K² and Nanga Parbat are composed of granite, and have been intruded or compressed upward from beneath the earth's crust.

Mr. Hayden further concludes that the exceptional height of these great peaks is due to their being composed of granite, for either the superior power of the granite to resist the atmospheric forces tending to their degradation has caused them to stand as isolated masses above surrounding areas of more easily eroded rocks, or they are areas of special elevation.

So argues Mr. Hayden, who further demonstrates that when, during the development of the Himalayas as a mighty mountain range vast masses of granite welled up from below, forcing their way through and lifting up the pre-existing rocks superimposed upon them, it is probable that, owing to dissimilarity of composition and to structural weaknesses in certain portions of the earth's crust, movement was more intense at some points than at others, and that the granite was raised into more or less dome-like masses standing above the general level of the growing range, and subsequently carved by the process of erosion into clusters of peaks.

The great peaks being thus of intrusive origin, the question naturally arises whether they are still being intruded upward; whether those great forces at work beneath the surface of the earth are still impelling them upward; and if so, whether they are being forced upward more rapidly than the atmospheric forces are wearing down their summits. From the geological standpoint Mr. Hayden says that it is not at present possible to say whether the elevatory movement is still in progress, but he adds that many phenomena observable in the Himalayas lead us to infer that local elevation has until quite recently been operative, and the numerous earthquakes still occurring with such frequency and violence forcibly remind us that the Himalayas have by no means reached a period of even comparative rest. The surveyor can as yet give us no more certain answer. Colonel Burrard says the original observations of the great peaks made between 1850 and 1860 were not sufficiently prolonged at any one station to enable us to rely with certainty on the values of the height then obtained. When a slow variation in height has to be determined it is better to carry out a long series of observations from one station only, rather than to take a number of observations from different stations, as is necessary and as was done in determining the absolute height of peaks. But in 1905 the Survey of India commenced a series of observations from one station, and it is proposed to observe the heights of several peaks for some years and at different seasons in each year. Then if a reliable series of results be once obtained, a similar set of observations can be repeated at a subsequent date, and any actual change of height that has occurred in the interval may be discovered.

So far we have considered the isolated peaks rather than the ranges themselves. It remains to study these latter. All of them are popularly regarded as forming part of the "Himalayas." But Himalaya—pronounced with the stress on the second syllable—simply means the "abode of snow"; and geographers have had to define the separate ranges into which this great Himalayan region is divided. The name of the Great Himalaya is consequently reserved for the supreme range which extends from the western borders of China, carries the great peaks, Mount Everest and Kinchinjunga, and runs through Kumaon and Kashmir to Nanga Parbat, and possibly farther. This is the culminating range of the earth's surface. The range to the north, on which stands K² and some satellite peaks of 26,000 feet, is neither so long nor has it quite such lofty peaks. It is known as the Karakoram range because a pass called the Karakoram Pass crosses it. But a pass called the Mustagh also crosses it, and Mustagh means Ice Mountain, whereas Karakoram means black gravel. Mustagh, therefore, appears to me a much more appropriate name for this gigantic range of ice-clad mountains. It so happens that I am the only European who has crossed both passes. Each of them is close upon 19,000 feet in altitude, but the Karakoram, very curiously, has in summer no snow upon it, and the route leads over black gravel. It is a better known pass than the former, and, consequently, the name of black gravel got the start, and now this superb range of mountains is doomed for all time to suffer from this absurd nomenclature.

The range, however, lies far at the back of Kashmir, and it is not so much with it as with the true Himalaya range that we are here concerned. The mountain ranges which encircle the valley of Kashmir are the final prolongations of that mighty range which runs from the borders of Burma thirteen hundred miles away, and bifurcating at the Sutlej River, forms with its subsidiary spurs the cradle in which the Kashmir valley is set.

The southern branch of this bifurcation is known as the Pir Panjal range, and is that which bounds Kashmir on the south. It is the largest of all the lesser Himalayan ranges, and even at its extremity in Kashmir it carries many peaks exceeding 15,000 feet; the Tatakuti Peak, 30 miles south-west of Srinagar, 15,524 feet in height, being the most conspicuous.

The northern branch of the bifurcation at the Sutlej River of the great Himalayan range culminates in the Nun Kun peaks (23,410 feet and 23,250 feet), which stand conspicuously 3000 feet above the general crest of the range, and can be seen on clear days from Gulmarg. From near them, not far from the Zoji-la, an oblique range branches from the great Himalayan range, and constitutes the parting between the Jhelum River and the Kishenganga, the latter river draining the angle formed by the bifurcation. The height of this North Kashmir range, as Colonel Burrard calls it, is greatest near the point of bifurcation, one of its peaks, Haramokh (16,890 feet), reaching above the snow-line, and being the most conspicuous object which meets the eye of a traveller entering the valley from the south. Farther westward the range ramifies and declines.

The main line of the great range of the Himalayas has meanwhile continued from the remarkable depression at the Zoji Pass along by the Kamri Pass, to the immense mountain buttress of Nanga Parbat which, overhanging the deep defiles of the Indus, seems to form a fitting end to the mighty range which started on the confines of China. But there are great mountains beyond the Indus also, and whether these form a continuation of the great Himalayan axis which the river Indus would in that case have merely cut through in the gorges below Nanga Parbat, or whether the mountains west of the Indus are part of a separate range, we shall not know till these latter have been geologically examined.

CHAPTER XIV

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.

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?

To realise the full, long-measured roll of their majestic evolution we should have to go back to the time when the swift revolving sun—itself one only among a hundred million other stars of no less magnitude—swished off from its circumference the wreath of fiery mist now called the Earth; and we should have to trace that mist, cooling and consolidating, first to a molten mass with a plastic crust enveloped in a dense and watery atmosphere, and then to a hardened surface of dry land with cavities in which the ocean settled. But the story, as it is with more detailed accuracy known, commences at the time when a shallow sea covered central and northern India, and extended over the site of the present Himalaya, including Kashmir and the region of the mighty peaks behind. This, then, is the first essential fact to lay hold of, that at the commencement of the authentic history of Kashmir, the whole—vale and mountain peak alike—lay unborn beneath the sea.

How long ago this was it is not possible to say within a million years or so. But this much may be said with certainty, that the period is to be reckoned not in thousands, nor yet in hundreds of thousands, but in millions of years. Geologists have names for different geological epochs, and do not usually speak of them by definite numbers of years, for there is still much controversy as to the precise length of time occupied by each. But to fix in the mind of the general reader a rough idea of the immense periods of time with which we are dealing in tracing the history of the mountains, it is useful to speak in terms of numbers, even though they may be only very approximately correct. We may then assume that the oldest rocks in Kashmir were deposited in sediment at the bottom of the afore-mentioned shallow sea a hundred million years ago. Some geologists and biologists think that a still longer time must have elapsed. Some physicists would maintain that even so much is not allowable. But as an average opinion, we may take a hundred million years ago as the commencement of Kashmir history.

What were the limits of the sea which then rolled over the site of Kashmir is not yet precisely known. But the lower portion of the Indian peninsula was then dry land, and connected by land with Africa; and the sea probably extended westward to Europe and eastward to China. Into it the rivers bore down the debris and detritus worked off by the rain from the dry land; and thus were slowly deposited, in the long course of many million years, sediments hundreds and thousands of feet in thickness which, subsequently upheaved and hardened, form the Kashmir mountains of the present day.

The first great movement of which authentic record has yet been traced took place at the close of the Jaunsar period. The bosom of the earth heaved restlessly, and what had already been deposited in the depths of the sea now emerged above the surface. Volcanoes burst through the crust, and the sedimentary deposits, hardened into rock, were covered with sheets of lava and volcanic ash, which now form the hills at the back of Srinagar, including the Takht-i-Suliman.

This was Kashmir's first appearance—not, however, in the form of a beautiful valley surrounded by forests and snow-capped mountains, but rather in the form of an archipelago of bare volcanic islands. And even these were not permanent, for a period of general subsidence followed and they slowly sank beneath the sea which was then probably connected with America.

During the Devonian period Kashmir was still submerged; but in a subsequent portion of the time when the Carbonaceous system was being deposited there was a second period of great volcanic activity, when the southern portion of Kashmir again formed an archipelago of volcanic islands.

Eventually all Kashmir emerged, and became part of the mainland of India at that time joined with Africa; so that Kashmir which had before been joined by sea with America was now joined by land with Africa. Such are the mighty movements of this seemingly immovable earth.

But it was only for a brief space that Kashmir was visible. Then once again, in mid-Carboniferous times, it subsided beneath the sea, there to remain for some millions of years till the early Tertiary period, four million years ago, when it again emerged, and the sea was gradually pushed back from Tibet and the adjacent Himalaya, till by the end of the Eocene period both Tibet and the whole Himalaya had finally become dry land. Kashmir was now a portion of the continental area and the culminating effort of the earth forces was at hand. For yet another period of great volcanic activity ensued, connected, perhaps, with the crustal disturbances to which the origin of the Himalaya is attributed. Masses of molten granite were extruded from beneath the earth's surface through the sedimentary deposit. And these granitic masses, issuing from the fiery interior of the earth, pushing ever upward, reached and passed the level of eternal snow till they finally settled into the line of matchless peaks now known as the Himalaya.

This then, briefly, is a record of the successive phases of upheaval and subsidence through which Kashmir has passed. Through by far the greater portion of the earth's history—through perhaps ninety out of the hundred million years—Kashmir has lain beneath the sea. And it is only within the last four million years that it has finally emerged.

What has actually caused the final upheaval; from whence came the force which raised the mountains is not yet entirely known. One well-known theory is that the earth's crust in cooling has to accommodate itself to a constantly decreasing diameter, and so gets crinkled and crumpled into folds. Anyhow from whatever cause, and quite apart from the ordinary up-and-down movements of the crust, there has evidently been immense lateral pressure, and on the drive into Kashmir many instances may be observed of the once level strata being crumpled into folds as the leaves of a book might be on being laterally pressed. There has been, says Mr. Middlemiss, "a steadily acting lateral pressure of the earth's crust tending to bank it up against the central crystalline zone [that is the core of intrusive granite of which the line of great peaks is formed] by a movement and a resistance in two opposite directions." And besides this pressure, the effect of tangential stresses tending to compress the earth's surface laterally and so form corrugations on it, there was from some remote internal cause this welling up from below of vast masses of granite which forced their way through the pre-existing rocks and formed the high peaks, the core of the Himalayan ranges.

These were the approximate causes—though the ultimate causes are not known—from which the Kashmir mountains originated. And tremendous though the forces must have been to cause such mighty effects, there is no evidence that they were violent. The stupendous result may have been imperceptibly attained. If Nanga Parbat rose not more than one inch in a month, it would have taken only 26,600 years to rise from the sea-level, and this is but a moment in the vast epochs with which we are dealing. Nature has worked without haste and without violence. Slowly, relentlessly, and uninterruptedly her work has progressed till the great final result stands before us in all its impressive majesty.

Such was the origin and history of the Kashmir mountains. It remains to trace the course of life upon them, and picture their appearance in the various stages of their history.

Of this initial stage, which would not have been perceptible to the naked eye, no trace could possibly be left, but in the pre-Cambrian rocks in Europe there have been detected very minute specimens of the simplest known forms of life—the Protozoa—and obscure tracks and markings indicating the existence of life of some kind. And in the next geological period—the Cambrian and Silurian, say between thirty and fifty million years ago—there is not indeed in the Kashmir rocks yet any sign of life, but in the neighbouring district of Spiti there has been found in corresponding rocks fossils of corals, trilobites, shell-fish, worms, brachiopods (lamp-shells), and gastropods.

When Kashmir made its first brief emergence from the waters, in an archipelago of volcanic islands, though there was life of low and simple kind in the sea, on land there was none, and the islands must have been absolutely bare. Neither on hill-side nor on plain was there a speck of vegetation, not even the humblest moss or lichen, and not a sign of animal life. No bird or insect floated in the air. And over all there must have reigned a silence such as I remember in the Gobi Desert, and which was so felt that when after many weeks I arrived at an oasis, the twittering of the birds and the humming of the insects appeared as an incessant roar.

It does not, however, follow from its bareness that the scenery of this archipelago may not have been beautiful, for those who have frequently passed up the Gulf of Suez know that the early morning and evening effects on bare deserts and rocky hills are often the most perfect in the delicacy and brilliance of their opalescent hues, and that the combination of this colouring with the bluey-green and the life and sparkle of the sea makes up a beauty which wooded mountain-sides may often lack. And as from the islands the summits of snowy ranges in India and Central Asia might be discerned, Kashmir even in its primitive and most barren stage must yet have had many a charm of its own.

But the bareness of the islands must have shortened the term of their existence, for it meant that the hills and plains were easily scoured out by the torrential rains which then fell upon them. It seems difficult in these days to imagine that when tropical rains fall on barren land they will not at once bring up a luxuriant crop of vegetation which would do much to keep the soil in its position; but in those days there was on land no plant life of any description. The hills and plains must, in consequence, have been deeply scoured, and rushing rivers have rapidly carried, in sand and boulders and muddy and chemical solution, the disintegrated surface of the land to the bottom of the sea, and laid down there the sediments and deposits which, subsequently upheaved, form the Kashmir rocks of the present day.

It is not until we come to the almost mediæval period corresponding to the Coal Measures, about twenty million years ago, that the record of land life in Kashmir begins.

In the hill-sides behind Khunmu, a little village about ten miles east of Srinagar, there is a series of rocks lying in layers over the older "trap" rocks of volcanic origin which form the great bulk of the neighbouring mountains, and in these sedimentary rocks, in what are called carbonaceous shales, are found some ferns named gangamopteris. They were discovered in 1906 by Mr. Hayden, and they are estimated by him to be "not younger than Upper Carboniferous," and they "may belong to the basis of that subdivision, or even to the Middle Carboniferous," that is, they may be about fifteen to eighteen million years old. At the same place, but on a layer of later date, have also been found fossil brachiopods—marine shell-fish resembling cockles—also of Upper Carboniferous times.

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.

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.

And now at this period of upheaval—the Tertiary period of geologists—a great change had come in the animal and vegetable worlds. Man had not arisen even yet, but birds and mammals and flowers, and all kinds of trees were now developed; and this marked the threshold of the modern type of life. The ages when the great ferns and palms and yew-like conifers were the leading forms of vegetation had passed away, and the period of the hard-wood trees and evergreens had commenced. The great reptiles, too, which in such wonderful variety of type were the dominant animals of the earth's surface in the period following the Carboniferous now waned before the increase of the mammals.

At the commencement of the Tertiary period there grew cypress, sequoiæ (Wellingtonia and redwood trees), chestnuts, beeches, elms, poplars, hornbeam, willows, figs, planes, maples, aloes, magnolia, eucalyptus, plums, almonds and alders, laurels, yews, palms, cactus, smilax, lotus, lilies, ferns, etc. Later on appeared cedars, spurge laurel, evergreen oak, buckthorn, walnut, sumachs, myrtle, mimosa and acacia, birch, hickory, bamboos, rose laurel, tulip trees; and among flowers buttercups, marsh marigolds, chick-weed, mare's tail, dock, sorrel, pond-weed, cotton-grass, and royal ferns. Traces of all these trees and plants have not been found in Kashmir, but remains of a great many of them have been discovered, and, as it was linked on with Europe where they have been found, there is no doubt that they and the animals now to be described must have grown in the varying altitudes of the now upraised mountains.

This period, as we have seen, is particularly remarkable for the advent of mammals, and there now appeared the earliest representative of the tribe of monkeys; the ancestors of the horse, about the size of small ponies with three toes on each foot; herds of ancestral hornless deer and antelope; animals allied to our wolves; foxes; numerous hog-like and large tapir-like animals, some the size of elephants with the habit of a rhinoceros; opossums; and representatives of hedgehogs, squirrels, and bats. The reptiles included tortoises and turtles, crocodiles and serpents. Birds had also for some time past developed from reptiles, and now included a kind of albatross and birds allied to the buzzard, osprey, hawk, nuthatch, quail, pelican, ibis, and flamingo.

Later in the same period appeared parroquets, trogons, cranes, eagles, and grouse. And now was the reign of the hippopotamus, while there followed rhinoceros, shrew, moles, and musk rats. Later still the huge animals with probosces held the first place—the colossal mastodons and troops of elephants. The forests were also tenanted with apes. Other animals were sabre-toothed tigers and the earliest form of bear. Altogether Kashmir would at the time have been a paradise for sportsmen. But man had not yet appeared.

After the mountains had been finally upheaved it is evident, from the existence of those level plateaux of recent alluvial deposit called karewas, that the Kashmir valley must have been filled with a lake to some hundreds of feet higher than the present valley bottom. Where the Jhelum River at present escapes from the valley was then blocked up, and the whole valley filled with what must have been the most lovely lake in the world—twice the length and three times the width of the Lake of Geneva, and completely encircled by snowy mountains as high and higher than Mont Blanc; while in the immediately following glacial period mighty glaciers came wending down the Sind, Lidar, and other valleys, even to the very edge of the water.

Whether man ever saw this lovely lake it is not yet possible to say. The Glacial period commenced rather more than a quarter of a million years ago, and it was about then that man first appeared, among other places, in the great river valleys of central and southern India, where the climate is not extreme, and wild fruits, berries, etc., were procurable at every season of the year. But when he spread up the valley of the Jhelum to Kashmir we have not yet the means of saying. What appear to be some remains of the handiwork of man were recently found by Mr. Radcliffe in a cave in the Lolab, near the borders of the Wular Lake, and seem to indicate the presence of man long anterior to the first dawn of Kashmir history. But the dawn of Kashmir history is only 2200 years ago, and man must have appeared 250,000 years before that. For thousands of years he must have been bravely battling against Nature and against the numerous and powerful animals which then lorded the earth. Slowly he must have made his way from the warm valleys of the Nerbudda and the Ganges to the rivers of the Punjab, and up the Jhelum valley into Kashmir. But he eventually established himself there as the beautiful lake was almost drained away and the Kashmir of the present day was finally evolved.

So we bring up the history of the mountains till it joins with the history of the people; and as the story finishes, does not one great thought emerge—the thought of the youth, the recentness of man alongside the hoary mountains? During the one hundred million years of the mountains' history mankind has existed only a quarter of a million; and his recorded history extends over not even a hundredth part of a single million years. And if we reflect on this, and consider, too, that the sun's heat will last to render life possible for many millions of years yet, does it not seem almost criminally childish for us—Hindus, Christians, and Mohamedans alike—to be so continually and incessantly looking backward to great and holy men of the past, as if all the best were necessarily behind, instead of sometimes looking forward to the even greater men to come—to the higher species of men who will yet evolve; of whom our holiest and our greatest are only the forerunners; and for the production of whom it should be our highest duty to consciously and of purpose pave the way, as the poor primitive men, though unconsciously, prepared the ground for the civilised men of to-day? Ought we not to more accurately adjust our sense of proportion; to rise above the ant-like attitude of mind, and attune our thoughts to the breadth and height of the mountains, to the purity of their snowy summits, and to the depth and clearness of the liquid skies they almost touch?

To some the sight of these mountain masses, the thought of the tremendous forces which gave them rise, and the idea of the aeons of time their moulding has involved, brings no other feeling than depression. The size, the titanic nature of the forces and the vastness of the time impress them only with a sense of the littleness of man in comparison. But why should the mountains thus depress? Why should not their history bring us the more worthy thought of the mighty possibilities of the race? For man, small in stature though he may be, is after all the flower and finish of the evolutionary process so far; he is century by century acquiring a completer mastery over Nature; and when we see how young and recent he is beside the aged mountains, when we realise how they have only evolved by minute gradations accumulating over vast periods of time, and when we reflect that nearly similar periods may yet lie before mankind, should not our thoughts dwell rather on man's future greatness and on the mighty destiny which he himself may shape?

With our imagination tethered to the hard-rock fact that man has developed from a savage to a Plato and a Shakespeare, from the inventor of the stone-axe to the inventor of telegraphy in the paltry quarter million years of his existence, may we not safely give it rope to wander out into the boundless future? We are still but children. We may be only as young bees, crawling over the combs of a hive, who have not yet found their wings to fly out into the sun-lit world beyond. Even now we suspect ourselves of possessing wing-like faculties of the mind whose use we do not know, and to which we are as yet afraid to trust. But the period of our infancy is over. The time to let ourselves go is approaching. Should we not look confidently out into the future and nerve ourselves for bold, unfettered flight?

And may we not still further hope that in the many million years the earth may yet exist we may master the depressing fate which lies before us when the sun's heat is expended; and look forward to evolving from ourselves beings of a higher order who will be independent of the used-up planet which gave them birth, and may be swarm away to some far, other sun-lit home?

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