[Sidenote: LOWER NUBRA. _October, 1847._]
[Sidenote: FOSSIL SHELLS IN THE CLAY. _October, 1847._]
The general aspect of the lower part of Nubra requires no particular description, as it presents much the same features as the other parts of the district. The mountains on both sides of the valley are not less steep, barren, and inaccessible than elsewhere in Tibet. The alluvial platforms, which were everywhere present, increased remarkably in thickness as they diminished in size. Widely spread out in the broadest parts of the valley, they were not more than from twenty to forty feet thick where cut across by the river, and sloped very gently. In the narrower parts of the valley they were often not less than a hundred feet high along the river. In structure these platforms varied much. The greater part certainly consisted of gravel and clay, quite unstratified, but the lower beds were very frequently fine clay, or fine sand, or alternations of these two. The superposition of the coarse beds to the fine was nearly uniformly observed, though occasionally, above the fine clays, alternations of gravel with thin beds of sand or clay were met with. In one place, on the north side of the river, nearly opposite to the village of Tertse, I found these beds to contain fresh-water shells. The fossiliferous bed was elevated very little above the present level of the river, and was composed of a fine somewhat sandy clay, stratified horizontally, and covered with upwards of fifty feet of coarse conglomerate. The shells, which were all small, were species of _Planorbis_ and _Lymnæa_, apparently identical with those afterwards found in the neighbourhood of Iskardo, but quite different from those of the salt lake of Thogji.
The villages of Lower Nubra are not numerous, but some of them possess very extensive cultivation. Hundar in particular, at the mouth of a large ravine, by which a considerable tributary stream descends from the south (at the source of which there is a pass across the range into the valley of the Indus), is a very large village (probably the most populous in Nubra), with very fine orchards of apricot-trees. Walnut, mulberry, and _Elæagnus_ became common at Unmaru, on the north bank of the river. Perhaps the gradual narrowing of the valley may have a considerable effect in modifying the climate, for the diminution of elevation is very inconsiderable, the river at Kuru being nearly 10,300 feet above the sea, or not more than 300 feet lower than the junction of the Shayuk and Nubra rivers.