NO MAN'S LAND 159 



it to leave its foster-mother, an old Tibet pony, which the 

 clever Hunias refused to sell except for an exorbitant 

 sum. 



At Laptel we said good-bye to the kiang and the nyang 

 and other wild inhabitants of Tibet, and had a long and 

 trying march to Topidunga in the deep valley of the 

 Kyungar river. The geology of these parts is most re- 

 markable. The great chasm through which the water 

 from Tibet flows cuts down the great central body of the 

 range right from top to bottom. The very bowels of 

 the earth are laid bare to the eye, and one sees the strata 

 of rocks, which were deposited in the bottom of the sea 

 like beds of sand or mud or calcareous deposits of sea- 

 shells, stuck up on end instead of lying fiat as the sea left 

 them. Some of them are composed entirely of sea-shells, 

 conspicuous among which are the ammonites, which we 

 observed in heaps lying on the surface, being solid lime- 

 stone casts of delicate nautilus-like shells, which in life 

 were the abode of primeval molluscs. They were of all 

 sizes up to great cart-wheels of 4 feet across, convoluted 

 in beautiful proportion like a flattened out snail-sheU or 

 the horns of the Ovis Ammon, which derives its name from 

 the cornu Ammonis of ancient mythology. There were 

 visible from the summit of this pass, on the face of the 

 cliff, a variety of rock formations of various colours, 

 ranged like books in a shelf. Such sections of the crust 

 of the earth, by which its layers and beds are cut into 

 and exposed to view, are common enough in all mountain 

 ranges ; but for grandeur nothing I have seen elsewhere 

 can compare with these gaps cut down into the heart of 

 the earth right through the Himalayan range. It must 

 be remembered that, while the top of the pass is about 

 18,000 feet, the stream emerges from its desperate passage 

 through the gap at a place on the Dhauli river not 



