[Illustration: 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.