OCR Text |
Show 88 STEPPES AND DESERTS. toises (2558 English feet), until, north of Teheran, it rises again to a height of 2295 toises (14,675 English feet) in the volcano of Demavend. 4. The mountain system of the Himalaya. The normal direction of this system is east and west when followed from 81° to 97° E. long. from Greenwich, or through more than fifteen degrees of longitude from the colossal Dhawalagiri (4390 toises, 28,071 English feet) to the breaking through of the long-problematical Dzangbotschu river (the Irawaddy, according to Dalrymple and Klaproth), and to the chains running north and south, which cover the whole of Western China, and in the provinces of Sse-tschuan, Hu-kuang, and Kuang-si form the great mountain group of the sources of the Kiang. The next highest culminating point to the Dhawalagiri, of this east and west part of the Himalaya, is not, as has been hitherto supposed, the eastern peak of the Schamalari, but the Kinchinjinga. This mountain is situated in the meridian of Sikhim, between Bootan and Nepaul, and between the Schamalari (3750? toises, 23,980 English feet) and the Dhawalagiri: its height is 4406 toises, or 26,438 Parisian, or 28,174 English feet. It was first measured accurately by trigonometrical operations in the present year, and as the account of this measurement received by me from- India says decidedly, "that a new determination of the Dhawalagiri leaves to the latter the first rank among all the snow-capped mountains of the Himalaya," the height of the Dhawalagiri must necessarily be greater than that of 4390 toises, or 26,340 Parisian, 28,071 English feet, hitherto ascribed to it. (Letter of the accomplished botanist of Sir James Ross's Antarctic Expedition, Dr. Joseph Hooker, written from Dorjiling, July 25, 1848.) The turning point in the direction of the axis of the Himalaya range is not far f1·om the Dhawalagiri, in 79° E. long. from Paris (81 ° 22' Greenwich). From thence to the westward, the IIimalaya no longer runs east and west, but from SE. to NW., connecting itself, as a great cross vein, between Mozufferabad and Gilgit south of Kafiristan, with a part of the Hindu-Coosh. Such a bend or change in the direction or strike of the axis of elevation of the Himalaya (from E.-W. to SE.-NW.), doubtless points, as in the western part of our European Alps, to a difference in the age or epoch of elevation. The course of the Upper Indus, from |