60 VIEWS OF NATURE. 



districts of Kashmir, which has excited so great an interest 

 in Germany, and whose climatic advantages have lost some- 

 what of their reputation since Carl von Hugel's account of 

 the four months of winter suow in the streets of Sirinagur,* 

 does not lie on the high crests of the Himalaya, as has com- 

 monly been supposed, but constitutes a true cauldron -like 

 valley on their southern declivity. On the south-west, where 

 the rampart-like Pir Panjal separates it from the Indian Pun- 

 jaub, the snow-crowned summits are covered, according to 

 \igne, by basaltic and amygdaloid formations. The latter 

 are very characteristically termed by the natives schischak 

 deyu, or devil's pock-marks. f The charms of the vegetation 

 have also been very differently described, according as tra- 

 vellers passed into Kashmir from the south, and left behind 

 them the luxuriant and varied vegetation of India ; or from 

 the northern regions of Turkestan, Samarkand, and Ferghana. 

 -Moreover, it is only very recently that we have obtained 

 a clearer view regarding the elevation of Thibet, the level of 

 the plateau having long been uncritically confounded with 

 the mountain tojDS rising from it. Thibet occupies the space 

 between the two great chains of the Himalaya and the Kuen- 

 liin, and forms the elevated ground of the valley between 

 them. The land is divided from east to west, both by the 

 inhabitants and by Chinese geographers, into three parts. 

 We distinguish Upper Thibet, with its capital, H'lassa (pro- 

 bably 9592 feet high); Middle Thibet, with the town of Leh 

 or Ladak (9995 feet) ; and Little Thibet, or Baltistan, called 

 the Thibet of Apricots (Sari-Butan), in which lie Iskardo 

 (63C0 feet), Gilgit, and south of Iskardo, but on the left bank 

 of the Indus, the plateau Deotsuh, whose elevation was deter- 

 mined by Yigne (11 ,977 feet). On carefully examining all the 

 notices we have hitherto possessed regarding the three Thi- 

 bets, and which will have been abundantly augmented during 

 the present year by the brilliant boundary surveying expedi- 

 tion under the auspices of the Governor-general, Lord Dal- 

 housie, we soon become convinced that the region between 

 the Himalava and the Kuen-lun is no unbroken table-land, 

 but that it is intersected by mountain groups, which un- 

 doubtedly belong to perfectly distinct systems of elevation. 



* See his Kashmir, Bd. ii. s. 196. 



•+ Yigne, Travels in Kashmir, 1842, vol. i. pp. 237 — 293. 



