Nearer East / [D.G. Hogarth].

  • David George Hogarth
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Nearer East / [D.G. Hogarth]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    *4 affluents, is arrested by a continuous curving swell of the land. High, precipitous, and very broad at the north end, the mountains which compose this swell shrink greatly both in height and breadth as the curve turns south-eastward, then rise again into an imposing pyramid, only to drop once more as the bend swings round to true east. Thereafter the elevation rises steadily, with one slight check, to a broad ganglion of peaks, whence, after a last dip, it is carried high and almost straight eastward, till it falls by a steep stairway to the Black Sea. This swell is the Balkan watershed. The mountain mass at the end of the curve is the butt of the North Albanian Alps, which throw huge fibres through Montenegro to the Adriatic, to complete the partition of the Peninsula. The pyramid, which springs up between two depressions, is the mighty northern slope of Liubotrn, the butt and crown of the Shar range ; the second ganglion, which closes a gradual rise to the east, is the syenite group of Vitocha and the Rila Dagh, south of Sophia; and the straight continuation thence to the Black Sea is the u Haemus” or proper Balkan system. On the outer face of this great curve begins the “ Nearer East/' as for present purposes we are to understand that region. Here is a continuous parting of waters, but not, orographically, a continuous mountain range. For the swell, so far as its composition is known, is made up of a succession of oblique chains radiating to south- west and south-east, as from a common centre in the north-west. And though their foothills interlock to make an unbroken horizontal watershed, the integral ranges themselves, prolonged to the south, give a vertical, not a horizontal, direction to the main structural lines of the Balkan Peninsula, dividing the land into long Belts, which may communicate more readily with what lies to north or south of them, whether sea or land, than with one another (Fig. 2). The westernmost of these vertical Belts bears the general name Albania, being, as to its northern part, all
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