1867.] the Western Himalaya and Afghan Mountains. 37 



Upper Indus from Kulsi to Nodmo (and probably further east) ap- 

 pears to be excavated in this formation and the river flows in a fault 

 of it or more probably in the centre of a denuded anticlinal.* The 

 series of rocks (series of Upper Indus Valley) rest, on the North, 

 against the granite of the Kilas Range. Captain G. Austen, 

 to whom I owe these details, estimates it to be at least 3,000 feet 

 thick, and mentions also its appearance in Rodok at the North of the 

 Pang Kong Cho, resting there unconformably on slate. In the 

 limestone layer of this series (about 150 feet thick or more) Captain . 

 Austen found a few fossils which he was kind enough to show me. 

 They were very ill-preserved and fragmentary, but appeared to 

 resemble some forms found in the Kothair bed in Kashmir ; some 

 cyathophyllides are certainly not to be distinguished from those 

 represented at figures 56 and 57, Plate VII. Another fossil was 

 supposed to be the radical end of a Calamite. To complicate matters, 

 the fossils were declared by palaeontologists at home to be cretaceous. 

 The specimens are so bad, that I apprehend that this determination 

 must have rested entirely on the one fossil which I took for a Cala- 

 mite, and which was regarded, I suppose, as a Hippurite. My 

 own impression is, that the limestone is identical with the Kothair 

 bed of Kashmir, and therefore either the uppermost layer of the car- 

 . boniferous or perhaps the lowest of the Tiiassic. 



Above this Upper Indus series come the nearly horizontal grits 

 and coarse sandstones which form the flats called in Ladak Chang 

 Tang and Rang. The non-conformity between the Indus Series and 

 the Chang Tang beds is not conspicuous, as that dips at a very low 

 angle and these are nearly horizontal. There is also, I believe, a 

 great similarity of lithological character between the two formations, 

 one being merely the resettlement of the other. I conceive that 

 some difficulty may be experienced occasionally to decide where one 

 formation ends and the other begins. A few mammalian bones have 

 been found in the Chang-tang sandstone, and there is but little doubt 

 that this bed is similar to the sandstone and conglomerate of the 

 Great Thibet plateau to the north of the Niti Pass. These high 

 horizontal plateaux of conglomerate and sandstone are also observed 



* A very great number of rivers in the Himalaya run part of their course 

 in the centre of a denuded anticlinal. 



