i 5 8 



FANS IN KASHMIR. 



matter, so as to form a hard breccia. But often at the mouths of side 

 ravines, where they open into a plain or wide valley, there are broad 

 alluvial fans, well seen in Ladakh, in Kashmir. Such fans have a 

 slope of about 5, and an extent of about a mile, so that the apex 

 rises some 500 feet above the surrounding plain. These depressed 

 cones have been accumulated by the agency of streams bringing down 

 loosened detritus from the higher parts of the mountains. Sometimes 

 a number of fans unite together, as on the left bank of the Indus, 

 opposite Leh, where they form a continuous deposit for thirty miles, 

 which is fully two miles broad. The materials of the fan include more 

 or less rounded blocks of granite, which may be as much as four feet in 

 diameter, with sub-angular pieces of slate and shale, a few inches in 

 diameter, mixed with gravel and sand. Occasionally these fans have 

 been denuded by the Indus so as to form cliffs 50 to 100 feet high ; 

 and cases have occurred where a succession of fans has been formed 

 and denuded one below the other, in the same locality. 1 



Fig. 53. Fan at Tigar in Nttbra, at Ladakh (after Drew). 



The channels and banks at the mouths of rivers often extend out- 

 wards into a cape or headland, and contribute to extend the whole 

 breadth of the bordering coast, so that by the waste of the uplands 

 the low land is filled up, the river channels are raised, the coast is 

 extended into the sea, and the sea filled with shoals and sandbanks. 

 Thus the mouths of the Po, the Rhine, the Nile, the Euphrates, the 

 Ganges, and the Mississippi, have formed for themselves those broad 

 deltas which, within the historic era, have transformed ancient ports 

 into inland towns, and extended fertile pastures into areas where the 

 sea formerly washed. 



1 The fan-shaped masses are also commonly met with on the coasts of Norfolk 

 and Yorkshire, where the finely-divided gravel, mud, and drift descend from the 

 cliffs. 





