Kashmir by Sir Younghusband Francis Edward (paper ebook reader .txt) 📕

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.

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.