AN ARCHIPELAGO 219
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 con- sequence, 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,
