418 W. T. Blanford — Journey through Sikkim. [No. 4, 



feet. The little plateau, 2 miles by 4, according to Hooker, (and I 

 have no doubt his measurements are correct) is not only, as he says, 

 covered with transported blocks, but the whole mass is composed 

 of moraine, not a rock is to be seen in place throughout ! The mar- 

 shy bed of the Chachu, in the valley which runs along the eastern 

 side of the plateau, quite agrees with Hooker's description of it as an 

 old lake bed, the terminal moraine to which the lake was due still 

 existing. I climbed down to this valley and satisfied myself that 

 the slope of the plateau from top to bottom, 500 feet at least, con- 

 sists of loose stones and angular gravel, the usual moraine debris. 



It is not easy to account for so enormous an accumulation of moraine 

 as that of Phalung from the little valley of the Chachii, for if the 

 Phalung plain and a corresponding moraine of smaller dimensions, 

 which is seen east of the Chachu, on the flanks of the Chang-o-Khang 

 spurs, are the lateral deposits from the glacier which formerly filled 

 the Chachu valley, how it is possible to account for the compara- 

 tively small size of the terminal moraine which dams up the old 

 lake bed. That such an accumulation as the Phalung plains can 

 be formed at the termination of a large glacier is seen at the end 

 of the great Kinchinjhao glacier near Momay Samdong, but then 

 this difficulty arises : suppose that glaciers from Kinchinjhao and 

 Chang-o-Khang deposited this mass of debris, there must have 

 been an increase in the length of the Chachu glacier in order to 

 cut out again the lake bed in which it now runs. But the glacier, 

 when it deposited the Phalung moraines, must have filled the 

 whole valley, including the portion now occupied by the moraines 

 themselves, and therefore the glacier when longer was smaller 

 than when shorter, a palpable reductio ad absurdum. 



I am inclined to suspect that these moraine deposits of Pha- 

 lung must have come from the Lachen valley at a time when the 

 high Tibetan table-land to the north was a mass of snow, and 

 a large glacier passed off between Kinchinjhao and Chomiomo, 

 and down the Lachen valley j the same great glacier which left its 

 terminal moraines near Lamteng, at Tangii, and in a dozen inter- 

 mediate spots, as it slowly diminished in size, and even more 

 gigantic records of which than any now existing may have been 

 swept down the Tista valley by the heavy Sikkim rainfall and the 



