282 A NATURALIST IN HIMALAYA 



south-east and it gradually disappears. It is lost 

 beneath the second zone, the zone of Palaeozoic slates. 

 This is a formation of great thickness and covers a 

 wide area of Hazara. As we first meet it at its place 

 of contact with the granite, we find the strata almost 

 vertically upheaved and the slates converted into 

 crystalline schists in which may sometimes be found 

 beautiful flakes of mica. These schists are very 

 fissile. So brittle are they in places that the ants can 

 drive their tunnels and extend the ramifications of 

 their galleries between their crumbling laminae. Their 

 weathering is sometimes distinctive, for some of the 

 hills disintegrate into a soft white powder, giving 

 them the appearance of cliffs of chalk. There is 

 thus considerable metamorphosis in the lowest of the 

 sedimentary beds, the consequence, I suppose, of their 

 proximity to the central granite when it was intruded 

 in the molten state. 



We soon leave the crystalline schists and travel 

 onward over the upturned beds of slate. They are 

 extremely fissile, breaking away beneath our feet. 

 Here and there we find little bands of sandstone and 

 conglomerate each telling its story of the more troubled 

 waters in which it was laid down, or subordinate layers 

 of limestone indicating the still depths of a deeper sea. 

 But these are only unimportant breaks in the dull 

 monotonous slates. We smash them with a hammer, 

 but not a fossil can be found. We wonder what their 

 age can be. No organic remains give any assistance, 

 so we look to what lies above and below them. 

 Younger than the underlying granite, they are over- 

 laid unconformably by thousands of feet of limestone 

 which are themselves covered by Triassie sediments, 



