142 OLDHAM : SANDHILLS OF CLIFTON NEAR KARACHI. 



a high bank in front of the cliff, and separated from it by a hollow 

 kept open by the scour of the wind along the face of the bluff. East 

 of the termination of this bluff another series of sandhills stretches 

 inland between New Clifton and Ghizri. 



Such is the present distribution of the sandhills, and it appears 

 inevitable that, in the absence of preventive measures, Clifton itself 

 will become overwhelmed with sand, and the cliff on which it stands 

 lost in a maze of sandhills. This fate can doubtless be prevented, but 

 it seems doubtful whether it can be done except at a prohibitive cost 

 and by spoiling those amenities which alone make its prevention 

 desirable. 



The sandhills of Clifton are of that crescentic form known to 

 textbooks as burkhans or barchanes, and occur scattered, and separa- 

 ted from each other, near the boundaries of the area, but grouped 

 together and coalesced in the central position. Though of the 

 typical form found throughout the world, when loose sands are 

 exposed to steady winds, I noticed one divergence from the ordinary 

 diagrammatic representations of this type of sandhills. The usual dia- 

 grammatic representation of a burkhan is that shown in fig. i, taken 

 from a paper by Dr. Vaughan Cornish, in which he collates the 



Fig. I. — Diagram plan of barchane, after Vaughan Cornish. 



accounts of sandhills known to him, and this representation is the 

 more valuable from the prerent point of view in that it is not 

 ( io ) 



