High Tatras [antikvár]

FOREWORD Lying in Eastern Czechoslovakia, the High Tatras spread over the northern part of the Slovak Socialist Republic. Our people have expressed their praise and admiration for these mountains - the smallest alpine massif of the world - in countless songs and legends. They have been so much a part of their lives that they are even mentioned in the Slovak part of the Czechoslovak national anthem. The High Tatras are the only massif of an alpine character in the whole huge area between the Alps and the Ural mountains> and at the same time the highest rangé in the Western Carpathians spreading between the Alps and the Balkan mountain ridge near the Black Sea. They have all the features and attributes of an alpine massif. In the Quaternary era they were covered for the most part with alpine glaciers the longest of which, the glacier of Bielovodská dolina Valley, was 14,2 km long and 300 m thick, feeding 19 other glaciers by its four branches. Present-day moraines and drifts, kettles and blocked-up tarnsy smooth boulders and masses of rock are all evidence of once intense glacial erosive action. You have but to ascend to a height of between 1000 and 2000 metres to witness somé of the very attractive effects of glacial erosion: steep-sided kettles, "amphitheatres", trough-shaped valleys with glen escarpments, several hundred metres high, overhanging the main valley and lateral and front moraines. The nicest ornaments of these glacial kettles, amphitheatres and valleys are glacial lakes and tarns, poetically called "plesá" - eyes of the sea, surrounded by moraines and eroded by the glacier into the rocky bed underlying the sub-alpine zone and the lower region of the alpine beit. One of the most magnificent features of these lakes are the many-coloured banks reflected in their clear piacid waters. There are more than 100 of them, each of a different size, shape and hue and of overall configuration of its environs. No less splendid is the rich, rare and diverse alpine fauna and flóra in which the High Tatra region and that of the adjacent Belanské Tatry Mountains so much abound. Somé 1300 plánt species are known to be growing here, half of which are the highland and the alp kinds including very rare Tatra, Carpathian and West-Carpathian endemic plants and glacial survivals. Coniferous trees largely predominate in the Tatra forests. By far the commonest is the spruce. In the sub-alpine zone it is the mountain pine - the dwarfed pine - that is predominant. Solitary limba-firs, rising far above the tops of