308 ANNUAL EEPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 2 



conquerors of the day left their imprint to some extent upon the 

 physiography of the land. Occasionally they cut down forests, 

 partially to replant them, in part to restore them as gardens, 

 orchards, shady walks, and leafy avenues. Moreover, though they 

 rarely built a road through a forest or over a mountain that com- 

 pared with the highways characteristic of Roman constructions, 

 yet all over northern India are indications that they made mountain 

 and jungle roads sufficient for the needs of transportation. 



The historic Khyber Pass is, of course, the best known of the gate- 

 ways through the Himalayan region, and when I passed over it in 

 1926 and looked for some remnant of the extensive forest that prob- 

 ably clothed both sides of the rugged valley along which Alexander 

 the Great and Kublai Khan led their disciplined hosts nearly 1,500 

 years ago, I looked in vain. Here and there a scrubby tree, a 

 solitary pine, or a clump of herbaceous shrubs showed their strug- 

 gling heads above the rocks, but otherwise the landscape consisted 

 of rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in the hot sunshine. No wonder the 

 Af ridis, Pathans, and other hill tribes are and were forced to forego 

 husbandry, forestr}^, and agriculture and to live mainly by inter- 

 necine warfare, robbery, and murder. Somebody has said the peo- 

 ple who do not raise cattle or cereals generally raise hell ! 



Farther east and south, but still within this northern parallel- 

 ogram, the scene changes. We find that the nearer we approach 

 Nepal and the eastern Himalayas the more liberally clothed in 

 tangles of jungle and evergreen forest are the mountain sides. 



The derivation of the word Plimalaya is both poetic and appropri- 

 ate. Him is the Sanskrit for snow and alaya means abode; hence 

 '' home of the snow." Geographically and roughly this magnificent 

 mountain range may be described as that elevated area between 

 Thibet and India fenced in by the rivers Indus and Brahmaputra. 

 The sides of the many valleys that crisscross the plateaus of these 

 lofty mountains are generally very steep. The gorges and canyons 

 have not been filled by the rivers and creeks that slowly carr}^ the 

 detritus of the hills to a resting jjlace in the lower levels. There are, 

 however, some exceptions to the rule, one of which is the lovely Vale 

 of Kashmir about whose natural history it is my purpose later to 

 speak. The alluvial debris carried by the river Jhelum meets a rocky 

 strait near Baramulla and instead of being borne along swift cur- 

 rents to empty into the Ganges it is deposited at the foothills to 

 form that fertile basin whose praises have been sung for so many 

 generations. 



If I were asked to say what section of north India affords the best 

 opportunity for a study of the denizens of this montane bushland I 

 would be inclined to choose Kashmir. On the other hand, such are 



