BARASINGHA GUFA

Herbert Daniel Gebauer - 15/07/2016

A funnel shaped doline gives access to a more or less joint controlled sinkhole cave situated at a walking distance of about 3 km north-west of Damauli, at about 40 km along the road from Pokhara to Kathmandu. On the hilly scarp 325 m above the left (northern) bank of Modi river, at an elevation of 630 m asl, the irregular shaped, up to 2 m wide and 1.8 m high cave entrance to the cave opens some 5 m above the level floor of a shallow, agriculturally exploited doline of almost circular shape. The doline is of solutional origin and measures roughly 30 m in diameter. A short distance further up the same slope and some 40 m behind the main cave entrance, lies a jungle clad, funnel shaped doline that offers access to the cave by way of a probably impenetrable vertical slot. This functions as a sink and appears to take a lot of water during rainy season. Before the surroundings where cultivated, the slot must have also functioned as an animal trap. GEOLOGY: The cave is developed in thinly laminated muddy limestone with frequent interbedded thin layers of sandy limestone and a few intercalations of green chlorotic phyllites. They are probably representing the late Palaeozoic (Permian?) Syangia Formation of the Mid Land Group. CAVE DESCRIPTION: The cave entrance leads to 150 m of walking sized and slightly descending passage, which enters, having passed a 10 m high aven, a breakdown area which obviously once restricted the flow of water an caused washed-in detritus to accumulate. Nowadays the water escapes by way of underlying shortcuts below the talus. At a somewhat higher level, a tube of less than half a metre in diameter serves as a bypass and gives access to a small chamber above breakdown, from where a crawl leads to an easy climb into the preserved continuation of the cleft-controlled passage. By and by the ceiling becomes lower and finally touches the washed-in pebbles which plug the current end of the cave. Remnants of solidified and multiple-layered conglomerates give witness to a currently weathering infilling. The vadose cave serves subterranean drainage only during the rains. It is characterised by cleft-controlled passages successively decreazing in size from near the cave entrances to the distal ends. The cave walls show tectonically distorted rhythmic layers in the millimetre to centimetre range. Arenaceous limestones protrude from the cave walls and alter with argillaceous limestones less resistant to weathering. Apart from the guano covered Entrance Series the cave's floor is covered - and probably somewhat sealed against corrosion - by well-rounded pebbles of phyllites (Ranimatta Formation?). Relics of well-consolidated conglomerates indicate two cycles of sedimentation and subsequent denudation, the lower of which bearing mammal remains. CAVE LIFE: At least two varieties of bats (Chiroptera, indet.) were seen while mapping the cave. The smaller one was seen only in swift escape, but the larger one was obviously a kind of horseshoe bat (Hipposideros, prob. armiger). From the surface of the dry stream bed's pebbles several bones and teeth of a herbivorous mammal were collected and found to originate from the cemented conglomerate infilling. Prof. Dr. A. Van den Driesch (Institute for Palaeoanatomy etc., München) determined the bones to belong to Swamp Deer (cervidae var, in Nepali: Barasingha), nowadays extinct in the area and only found across the mountain ridges in the Terai at much lower elevations.