Kashmir Part 14

What has actually caused the final upheaval; from whence came the force which raised the mountains is not yet entirely known. One well-known theory is that the earth's crust in cooling has to accommodate itself to a constantly decreasing diameter, and so gets crinkled and crumpled into folds. Anyhow from whatever cause, and quite apart from the ordinary up-and-down movements of the crust, there has evidently been immense lateral pressure, and on the drive into Kashmir many instances may be observed of the once level strata being crumpled into folds as the leaves of a book might be on being laterally pressed. There has been, says Mr. Middlemiss, "a steadily acting lateral pressure of the earth's crust tending to bank it up against the central crystalline zone [that is the core of intrusive granite of which the line of great peaks is formed] by a movement and a resistance in two opposite directions." And besides this pressure, the effect of tangential stresses tending to compress the earth's surface laterally and so form corrugations on it, there was from some remote internal cause this welling up from below of vast ma.s.ses of granite which forced their way through the pre-existing rocks and formed the high peaks, the core of the Himalayan ranges.

These were the approximate causes--though the ultimate causes are not known--from which the Kashmir mountains originated. And tremendous though the forces must have been to cause such mighty effects, there is no evidence that they were violent. The stupendous result may have been imperceptibly attained. If Nanga Parbat rose not more than one inch in a month, it would have taken only 26,600 years to rise from the sea-level, and this is but a moment in the vast epochs with which we are dealing. Nature has worked without haste and without violence.

Slowly, relentlessly, and uninterruptedly her work has progressed till the great final result stands before us in all its impressive majesty.

Such was the origin and history of the Kashmir mountains. It remains to trace the course of life upon them, and picture their appearance in the various stages of their history.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TANNIN GLEN, LIDAR VALLEY]

In that remote time, which we have roughly taken as a hundred million years ago, when the oldest rocks, those for instance at Gulmarg, were first laid down in level soft deposit on the ocean bottom, there was no life on land or sea. In no part of the world have the rocks of this period given the slightest trace of any form of life. But in the course of time, in some warm climate and in some quarter where sea and land meet, and where, through the action of the tides, a portion of the land is alternately covered and laid open to the sunshine--that is, in some spot where earth and air, light, heat and water might all have their effect--it has been surmised that minute microscopic specks of slime must have appeared imbued with just that mysterious element which distinguishes life from all chemical combinations however complex.

Of this initial stage, which would not have been perceptible to the naked eye, no trace could possibly be left, but in the pre-Cambrian rocks in Europe there have been detected very minute specimens of the simplest known forms of life--the Protozoa--and obscure tracks and markings indicating the existence of life of some kind. And in the next geological period--the Cambrian and Silurian, say between thirty and fifty million years ago--there is not indeed in the Kashmir rocks yet any sign of life, but in the neighbouring district of Spiti there has been found in corresponding rocks fossils of corals, trilobites, sh.e.l.l-fish, worms, brachiopods (lamp-sh.e.l.ls), and gastropods.

When Kashmir made its first brief emergence from the waters, in an archipelago of volcanic islands, though there was life of low and simple kind in the sea, on land there was none, and the islands must have been absolutely bare. Neither on hill-side nor on plain was there a speck of vegetation, not even the humblest moss or lichen, and not a sign of animal life. No bird or insect floated in the air. And over all there must have reigned a silence such as I remember in the Gobi Desert, and which was so felt that when after many weeks I arrived at an oasis, the twittering of the birds and the humming of the insects appeared as an incessant roar.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOING TO THE WEDDING, UPPER INDUS VALLEY]

It does not, however, follow from its bareness that the scenery of this archipelago may not have been beautiful, for those who have frequently pa.s.sed up the Gulf of Suez know that the early morning and evening effects on bare deserts and rocky hills are often the most perfect in the delicacy and brilliance of their opalescent hues, and that the combination of this colouring with the bluey-green and the life and sparkle of the sea makes up a beauty which wooded mountain-sides may often lack. And as from the islands the summits of snowy ranges in India and Central Asia might be discerned, Kashmir even in its primitive and most barren stage must yet have had many a charm of its own.

But the bareness of the islands must have shortened the term of their existence, for it meant that the hills and plains were easily scoured out by the torrential rains which then fell upon them. It seems difficult in these days to imagine that when tropical rains fall on barren land they will not at once bring up a luxuriant crop of vegetation which would do much to keep the soil in its position; but in those days there was on land no plant life of any description. The hills and plains must, in consequence, have been deeply scoured, and rushing rivers have rapidly carried, in sand and boulders and muddy and chemical solution, the disintegrated surface of the land to the bottom of the sea, and laid down there the sediments and deposits which, subsequently upheaved, form the Kashmir rocks of the present day.

It is not until we come to the almost mediaeval period corresponding to the Coal Measures, about twenty million years ago, that the record of land life in Kashmir begins.

In the hill-sides behind Khunmu, a little village about ten miles east of Srinagar, there is a series of rocks lying in layers over the older "trap" rocks of volcanic origin which form the great bulk of the neighbouring mountains, and in these sedimentary rocks, in what are called carbonaceous shales, are found some ferns named gangamopteris.

They were discovered in 1906 by Mr. Hayden, and they are estimated by him to be "not younger than Upper Carboniferous," and they "may belong to the basis of that subdivision, or even to the Middle Carboniferous," that is, they may be about fifteen to eighteen million years old. At the same place, but on a layer of later date, have also been found fossil brachiopods--marine sh.e.l.l-fish resembling c.o.c.kles--also of Upper Carboniferous times.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MOUNTAIN MISTS]

This, as it happens, was an interesting period in the earth's history.

For there occurred about then, or somewhat earlier, an extensive upheaval in many parts of the world, and mountains which have been now removed were upheaved to an alt.i.tude comparable with that of the highest ranges of the present day, and in the Punjab there then existed a snowy range with glaciers.

It was at this period that Kashmir was joined with the mainland of the Indian peninsula, which in its turn was joined with Africa, and now, at least, there must have been some vegetation and animal life. At this time of the Coal Measures--the remnants of forests growing in shallow sea-water--life was well advanced. Birds and mammals and flowers, and the more highly developed animals and plants had not yet appeared, but in the sea lived such things as star-fishes, sh.e.l.l-fishes, corals, sea-urchins, sea-lilies, sea-cuc.u.mbers, feather stars, sea-worms, sea-snails, cuttlefish, water-fleas and mussels, shrimps, and lobsters and fishes. In the coal swamps were ferns, "horse-tails" similar to the horse-tails of the present day, but of gigantic size, club mosses more than fifty feet high, lycopods, trees with trunks fifty feet high, and which bore catkins ripening into berries not unlike those of yews. In the fresh water were some sh.e.l.l-fishes, crustaceans, and fishes. On land were spiders, scorpions, some of gigantic size, and centipedes. Through the air flew hundreds of different kinds of insects, May flies, c.o.c.kroaches, crickets, and beetles. The magnate of the vertebrate world was the labyrinthodont (traces of which have been found in Kashmir), which had a salamander-like body, a long tail, bony plates to protect his head, and armour of integumentary scales to protect his body. Of land trees and plants there were lepidodendrons with huge stems clad with linear leaves and bearing cones; huge club mosses, climbing palms, such as grow in tropical forests of the present day, great funguses, and numerous ferns.

Such was the type of vegetation and of land and sea animal life of the Coal period, and although not many remains of this age have yet been found in Kashmir, enough traces have been discovered to satisfy us that in the shallow estuarial water and on the islands of the inland sea there lived an animal and vegetable life which must have been very similar to what we know existed elsewhere.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NEAR THE KOLAHOI GLACIER, LIDAR VALLEY]

For another fourteen million years or so after the Coal period there is nothing special to record in the history of Kashmir. There may have been a line of islands along the core of the present ranges, but the greater part of Kashmir had sunk once more beneath the waters, in which new sediments to enormous thickness were being acc.u.mulated, till in the late Cretaceous period, or about four million years ago, the great crustal compression began which finally upheaved these deposits from the ocean bottom, and formed the Kashmir of the present day. This upheaval was, however, neither sudden nor continuous. It was very gradual, it had three distinct phases, and was not complete till a million years ago when the dividing ocean entirely disappeared, and the Himalaya reached its maximum height.

And now at this period of upheaval--the Tertiary period of geologists--a great change had come in the animal and vegetable worlds. _Man_ had not arisen even yet, but birds and mammals and flowers, and all kinds of trees were now developed; and this marked the threshold of the modern type of life. The ages when the great ferns and palms and yew-like conifers were the leading forms of vegetation had pa.s.sed away, and the period of the hard-wood trees and evergreens had commenced. The great reptiles, too, which in such wonderful variety of type were the dominant animals of the earth's surface in the period following the Carboniferous now waned before the increase of the mammals.

At the commencement of the Tertiary period there grew cypress, sequoiae (Wellingtonia and redwood trees), chestnuts, beeches, elms, poplars, hornbeam, willows, figs, planes, maples, aloes, magnolia, eucalyptus, plums, almonds and alders, laurels, yews, palms, cactus, smilax, lotus, lilies, ferns, etc. Later on appeared cedars, spurge laurel, evergreen oak, buckthorn, walnut, sumachs, myrtle, mimosa and acacia, birch, hickory, bamboos, rose laurel, tulip trees; and among flowers b.u.t.tercups, marsh marigolds, chick-weed, mare's tail, dock, sorrel, pond-weed, cotton-gra.s.s, and royal ferns. Traces of all these trees and plants have not been found in Kashmir, but remains of a great many of them have been discovered, and, as it was linked on with Europe where they have been found, there is no doubt that they and the animals now to be described must have grown in the varying alt.i.tudes of the now upraised mountains.

This period, as we have seen, is particularly remarkable for the advent of mammals, and there now appeared the earliest representative of the tribe of monkeys; the ancestors of the horse, about the size of small ponies with three toes on each foot; herds of ancestral hornless deer and antelope; animals allied to our wolves; foxes; numerous hog-like and large tapir-like animals, some the size of elephants with the habit of a rhinoceros; opossums; and representatives of hedgehogs, squirrels, and bats. The reptiles included tortoises and turtles, crocodiles and serpents. Birds had also for some time past developed from reptiles, and now included a kind of albatross and birds allied to the buzzard, osprey, hawk, nuthatch, quail, pelican, ibis, and flamingo.

Later in the same period appeared parroquets, trogons, cranes, eagles, and grouse. And now was the reign of the hippopotamus, while there followed rhinoceros, shrew, moles, and musk rats. Later still the huge animals with probosces held the first place--the colossal mastodons and troops of elephants. The forests were also tenanted with apes.

Other animals were sabre-toothed tigers and the earliest form of bear.

Altogether Kashmir would at the time have been a paradise for sportsmen. But man had not yet appeared.

After the mountains had been finally upheaved it is evident, from the existence of those level plateaux of recent alluvial deposit called karewas, that the Kashmir valley must have been filled with a lake to some hundreds of feet higher than the present valley bottom. Where the Jhelum River at present escapes from the valley was then blocked up, and the whole valley filled with what must have been the most lovely lake in the world--twice the length and three times the width of the Lake of Geneva, and completely encircled by snowy mountains as high and higher than Mont Blanc; while in the immediately following glacial period mighty glaciers came wending down the Sind, Lidar, and other valleys, even to the very edge of the water.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LAKE SINSA NAG, LIDAR VALLEY]

Whether man ever saw this lovely lake it is not yet possible to say.

The Glacial period commenced rather more than a quarter of a million years ago, and it was about then that man first appeared, among other places, in the great river valleys of central and southern India, where the climate is not extreme, and wild fruits, berries, etc., were procurable at every season of the year. But when he spread up the valley of the Jhelum to Kashmir we have not yet the means of saying.

What appear to be some remains of the handiwork of man were recently found by Mr. Radcliffe in a cave in the Lolab, near the borders of the Wular Lake, and seem to indicate the presence of man long anterior to the first dawn of Kashmir history. But the dawn of Kashmir history is only 2200 years ago, and man must have appeared 250,000 years before that. For thousands of years he must have been bravely battling against Nature and against the numerous and powerful animals which then lorded the earth. Slowly he must have made his way from the warm valleys of the Nerbudda and the Ganges to the rivers of the Punjab, and up the Jhelum valley into Kashmir. But he eventually established himself there as the beautiful lake was almost drained away and the Kashmir of the present day was finally evolved.

So we bring up the history of the mountains till it joins with the history of the people; and as the story finishes, does not one great thought emerge--the thought of the youth, the recentness of man alongside the h.o.a.ry mountains? During the one hundred million years of the mountains' history mankind has existed only a quarter of a million; and his recorded history extends over not even a hundredth part of a single million years. And if we reflect on this, and consider, too, that the sun's heat will last to render life possible for many millions of years yet, does it not seem almost criminally childish for us--Hindus, Christians, and Mohamedans alike--to be so continually and incessantly looking backward to great and holy men of the past, as if all the best were necessarily behind, instead of sometimes looking forward to the even greater men to _come_--to the higher _species_ of men who will yet evolve; of whom our holiest and our greatest are only the forerunners; and for the production of whom it should be our highest duty to consciously and of purpose pave the way, as the poor primitive men, though unconsciously, prepared the ground for the civilised men of to-day? Ought we not to more accurately adjust our sense of proportion; to rise above the ant-like att.i.tude of mind, and attune our thoughts to the breadth and height of the mountains, to the purity of their snowy summits, and to the depth and clearness of the liquid skies they almost touch?

To some the sight of these mountain ma.s.ses, the thought of the tremendous forces which gave them rise, and the idea of the aeons of time their moulding has involved, brings no other feeling than depression. The size, the t.i.tanic nature of the forces and the vastness of the time impress them only with a sense of the littleness of man in comparison. But why should the mountains thus depress? Why should not their history bring us the more worthy thought of the mighty possibilities of the race? For man, small in stature though he may be, is after all the flower and finish of the evolutionary process so far; he is century by century acquiring a completer mastery over Nature; and when we see how young and recent he is beside the aged mountains, when we realise how they have only evolved by minute gradations acc.u.mulating over vast periods of time, and when we reflect that nearly similar periods may yet lie before mankind, should not our thoughts dwell rather on man's future greatness and on the mighty destiny which he _himself_ may shape?

With our imagination tethered to the hard-rock fact that man has developed from a savage to a Plato and a Shakespeare, from the inventor of the stone-axe to the inventor of telegraphy in the paltry quarter million years of his existence, may we not safely give it rope to wander out into the boundless future? We are still but children. We may be only as young bees, crawling over the combs of a hive, who have not yet found their wings to fly out into the sun-lit world beyond.

Even now we suspect ourselves of possessing wing-like faculties of the mind whose use we do not know, and to which we are as yet afraid to trust. But the period of our infancy is over. The time to let ourselves go is approaching. Should we not look confidently out into the future and nerve ourselves for bold, unfettered flight?

And may we not still further hope that in the many million years the earth may yet exist we may master the depressing fate which lies before us when the sun's heat is expended; and look forward to evolving from ourselves beings of a higher order who will be independent of the used-up planet which gave them birth, and may be swarm away to some far, other sun-lit home?