Kashmir, Sir Younghusband Francis Edward [the best novels to read .TXT] 📗

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 accumulated, 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 passed 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, sequoiæ (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 buttercups, marsh marigolds, chick-weed, mare's tail, dock, sorrel, pond-weed, cotton-grass, 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 altitudes 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.

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 hoary 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 attitude 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 masses, 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 titanic nature of the forces and the vastness of the time impress them only with a sense of the littleness of man