1868.] Notes on the Pancjong lake district of Ladahh. 115 



Gond lying on the Sind river a tributary of the Jhelum, Kashmir, 

 and at the village of Gond itself, marks of glacial action are un- 

 mistakeahle in the deep grooves or stria-marks cut in the hard 

 metamorphic slates, at a height of about 150 or 200 feet above the 

 present level of the river. This point is 20 miles in a direct line 

 from the head of the valley, where at present some very small glaciers 

 exist. How much further this glacier extended towards the plain 

 of the Kashmir valley, it is impossible to say ; but at the debouche- 

 ment 10 miles below, thick beds of debris are to be seen ; the Sind 

 river is still of very considerable size, and glacial accumulations are 

 very soon swept away, as may be seen in now existing large glaciers 

 below their terminal cliffs. 



Taking 5,500 feet as the lowest limit of its extension, every valley 

 in the vicinity of a range equal in mean altitude to the mountains 

 north of Kashmir, must have once been the bed of these moving 

 rivers of ice. The indications of glacier extension are also seen on 

 the north of the Zogi La, between the present glacier of Muchoi 

 and Pundras, at 10 miles from the pass. It is my belief that the 

 jDras plain was once buried in ice, and that this region presented 

 much the same appearance that the neighbourhood of the Mustakh 

 does now. The imagination can hardly conceive the enormous 

 magnitude that glaciers, like those in the Karakoram, must have 

 once attained;* and that they extended into the Skardo valley on 

 the Indus, 70 to 80 miles, is by no means improbable. Smaller 

 ones from the ridge to the south we know did, for near Kepchun, 

 a fine mass of moraine protrudes into the plain nearly a quarter of 

 a mile, having very large angular blocks on its surface. Moreover, 

 this moraine must have been formed after the valley around Skardo 

 had assumed somewhat its present configuration, for this basin has 

 at some period been filled up with beds of lacustrine deposit, gravels, 

 and conglomerates, to a height that overtops the present isolated 

 rock rising above the town, the coarser beds being the highest in 

 the series ; but it is quite natural to suppose that, on a milder climate 

 succeeding, these larger alluvial deposits would be the first to be 

 removed by the extinction of glaciers further down the valley, 



* The existing glacier of Baltoro is 36 miles long in direct horizontal 

 distance. 



