Note 974 — Chapter IX · THE LANDS

This translation is from Geikie, Founders of Geology, 1905, p. 43. The processes of erosion by winds and water as a cause for the inequalities of the earth’s surface are much more in evidence in arid regions than in regions of dense vegetation. It is therefore not surprising that these processes were recognized by Moslems like Avicenna (if it be he from whom Alfred of Sareshel translated the above quotation) and Ḥamd-Allāh Mustaufī, a Persian writer of the early fourteenth century, who dwelt in the arid countries of the East. The latter writes: “... the sun’s heat ... beginning to act on the stone, this loses its hardness and is broken up; which process continually accelerated by the succession of many nights and days, cracks appear, splitting the rocks, which same are thus again turned to earth. Then by the action of earthquakes mountain peaks are demolished, while by the blowing of the winds and the running waters the soft earth is carried from one place to another, yet all that is rock and hard soil will remain fixed, whereby heights and hollows are formed, and it is these heights that are mountain ranges” (Guy Le Strange, transl., The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulūb Composed by Ḥamd-Allāh Mustawfī of Qazwīn in 740 (1340), London and Leiden, 1919, p. 180).