THE KOPET DAGH. 47 
As our proposed route led us across the main range into Persian territory', General 
Ussakovsky, governor of the pro\-ince of Transcaspia, was good enough to advise 
us concerning the necessary diplomatic arrangements, and the Persian consul at 
Askhabad informed his government of our plans by telegraph. ( ieneral Ussakovsky 
also instructed Colonel Kukol-Yasnopolsky, district go^•ernor of Askhabad, to 
arrange for our escort of three mounted native guards, or "jiggits," and detailed his 
secretar}-, \'asily Gregorievitch Yanchevetzky, to accompany us. The latter gentle- 
man proved most helpful from his acquaintance with the countr}' and the people. 
He has since then accompanied ilr. Huntington on a winter journey to Sistan, on 
the border between Persia and Afghanistan. 
It ma}- be well to sa)- at the outset that we ga\e practically no attention to the 
paleontology of the formations traversed ; but we found some Echini in the mountain- 
making limestones, and an Ostrea in the shales of the valleys. Geological descrip- 
tions of the formations noted below are given in the report by Bogdanovitch (1887). 
Figure 17 is based upon unpublished maps prepared by Russian topographers and 
kindly lent to us by the officials at Askhabad, with pennission to publish our 
traced outlines. The original scale is 5 versts to an inch, here reduced to 10 versts 
to an inch. The altitudes are given on the map in feet, and are so quoted here. The 
unshaded areas are the ranges, anticlinal for the most part, of heavy Cretaceous 
limestones, whose total thickness must be 2,000 or 3,000 feet. The oblique shading 
represents the valleys, synclinal for the most part, of Cretaceous shales and sand- 
stones. The unshaded area on the upper border of the map is the piedmont plain 
of mountain waste. 
THE FIRrZA B.\SIN. 
On the first day. May 30, we dro\e from Askhabad to Firuza, a village situated 
at an altitude of about 2,000 feet, in a picturesque valley-basin that is inclosed from 
the plains by a local up-faulted front range. Here amid pleasant groves of trees the 
Russian officers stationed at Askhabad have their summer houses, one of which 
was courteously placed at our dispo.sal for the night's stop. The monoclinal front 
range, which rises at Mount Markou to 5,068 feet, as well as the broad anticline of 
the main range, whose summits exceed 9,000 feet in altitude, are trenched across by 
deep gorges cut by a stream which rises in the inner Serani synclinal valley. There 
is a terrace along the valley where it is eroded in the shales, by which an uplift at its 
headwaters with respect to the plains seems to be indicated, as will be under- 
stood from the following facts. At the mouth of the lower gorge (altitude about 
1,300 feet), the stream has entrenched itself about 50 feet below the piedmont plain. 
Within the gorge, whose generally transverse course is modified by pronounced 
.serpentine curves, the lower rock walls repeatedly steepen at their base, and so tend 
to cause the renewed dissection of the upper walls, whose slopes seem to have been 
formerly better graded. Seven miles up the stream, at Firuza, we ascended some 
of the hills, gaining a fine view of the synclinal basin, and noting a dissected terrace 
or bench, covered with coarse gravels, cobbles, and silt, here 220 feet over the 
stream. Tlie increase in depth of the present valley floor beneath the earlier valley 
