96 MIDDLEMISS: GEOLOGY OF HAZARA AND BLACK MOUNTAIN. 



Slate series end, and the latter occupies the whole of the great bare 

 monotonous tract between that watershed and the Koonhar river. 

 Villages like Chhothee Puttun, placed on comparatively flat or gently 

 sloping spurs, are surrounded by convex slopes of disintegrating slate, 

 whose ever-increasing steepness at last ends in the closely-shut-in 

 gorges that drain eastwards into the Koonhar river. 



The Koonhar river itself which taps the snow-fields of the Khagan 

 valley is of the nature of a profound gorge with a very winding and 

 very steep river-bed. 



Descriptive detail^ — general remarks. 



In writing up the descriptive part of a memoir such as this, there 

 are two dangers into which one may fall — one may say too much and 

 one may say too little. To bring forward exactly the right amount 

 of proof in the form of actual traverses to establish a given bit of 

 geological structure is a golden mean of which it is not always easy 

 to avail oneself. 



Hazara is a district in which roads from one place to another 

 follow no general direction or rule. From any one point the geologist 

 may start in any one of a great many radial directions following 

 native-made paths which go from village to village. The large num- 

 ber of traverses and counter-traverses which have thus been made 

 by myself and party would, if given as recorded in my note-books* 

 be tiresome and confusing ; many of them, as is but natural, have 

 proved of little use, whilst others merely repeat sections better ex- 

 posed elsewhere. On the other hand, it is equally necessary that 

 sections of some sort should be described — sections which must 

 include several formations, for the country is so complicated in detail 

 that to take any one formation and to describe it from beginning to 

 end, and then to take another and do likewise, disentangling each 

 and laying them out straight before the reader, would not only cause 

 endless repetition but would defeat the object of this chapter, which 

 is to show the formations, not as individuals, but as corporate mem- 

 bers of one structural whole. 



( 96 ) 



