India was now part of Gondwanaland; that vanished continent which then reached westward to South Africa and eastward to Australia.  A boulder-bed of glacial origin, the Talchir Boulder-bed, occurs in many surviving parts of this great land.  It enters largely into the Salt Range deposits.  There is evidence that extensive sheets of ice, wearing down the rocks of Rajputana, shoved their moraines northward into the Salt Range Sea; then, probably, a southern extension of the Tethys.

Subsequent to this ice age the Indian coalfields of the Gondwana were laid down, with beds rich in the Glossopteris and Gangamopteris flora.  This remarkable carboniferous flora extends to Southern Kashmir, so that it is to be inferred that this region was also part of the main Gondwanaland.  But its emergence was but for a brief period.  Upper Carboniferous marine deposits succeeded; and, in fact, there was no important discontinuity in the deposits in this area from Panjal times till the early Tertiaries.  During the whole of which vast period Kashmir was covered with the waters of the Tethys.

The closing Dravidian disturbances of the Kashmir region did not, apparently, extend to the eastern Himalayan area.  But the Carboniferous Period was, in this

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eastern area, one of instability, culminating, at the close of the Period, in a steady rise of the land and a northward retreat of the Tethys.  Nearly the entire Himalaya east of Kashmir became a land surface and remained exposed to denudative forces for so long a time that in places the whole of the Carboniferous, Devonian, and a large part of the Silurian and Ordovician deposits were removed—­some thousands of feet in thickness—­before resubmergence in the Tethys occurred.

Towards the end of the Palaeozoic Age the Aryan Tethys receded westwards, but still covered the Himalaya and was still connected with the European Palaeozoic sea.  The Himalayan area (as well as Kashmir) remained submerged in its waters throughout the entire Mesozoic Age.

During Cretaceous times the Tethys became greatly extended, indicating a considerable subsidence of northwestern India, Afghanistan, Western Asia, and, probably, much of Tibet.  The shallow-water character of the deposits of the Tibetan Himalaya indicates, however, a coast line near this region.  Volcanic materials, now poured out, foreshadow the incoming of the great mountain-building epoch of the Tertiary Era.  The enormous mass of the Deccan traps, possessing a volume which has been estimated at as much as 6,000 cubic miles, was probably extruded over the Northern Peninsular region during late Cretaceous times.  The sea now began to retreat, and by the close of

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the Eocene, it had moved westward to Sind and Baluchistan.  The movements of the Earth’s crust were attended by intense volcanic activity, and great volumes of granite were injected into the sediments, followed by dykes and outflows of basic lavas.