GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 283 



Vastly older than the Trias they must be, but how 

 much older we cannot tell. It is impossible to ascribe 

 their age with greater accuracy than to say that they 

 are Palaeozoic. 



Across the Himalaya, far away to the north, on the 

 Pamir plateau I have seen similar unfossiliferous slates 

 metamorphosed and upheaved by the same Himalayan 

 granite. They were the highest sediments I had ever 

 seen, and I suspect that they were stratigraphically the 

 same slates that here exist on the opposite side of the 

 mountain ranges. 



The accumulations of slate give characteristic 

 features to the landscape. Elongated parallel hills 

 range across the country. Their rounded backs are 

 bare of verdure save for a few scattered pines that 

 struggle hard for life, and a coarse mountain grass 

 parched and yellow until freshened by the summer 

 rains. Many happy days have I spent in their solitary- 

 glens watching the spiders spin their snares over the 

 brooks or the insects playing over the placid pools. 



We scramble on over the hills and reach the next 

 geological zone, the Infra-Trias series. Should fortune 

 favour, and we find the line of contact between the 

 slates and the superimposed beds, we will see a broad 

 band of conglomerate resting unconformably on the 

 upturned ends of the fissile slates. In the conglomer- 

 ate are flattened and waterworn fragments of those 

 same slates, indicating that from the denudation of the 

 slates the conglomerate was partly formed. The sea 

 deepens ; the conglomerate is replaced by purple 

 sandstone and later the sandstone by an immense 

 thickness of limestone. Massive and imposing hills 

 are built up of this formation, To the south they 



