Fig. 8. THE MIGRATIONS OF TIIE KONTSCHE-DARJA.
tinctly marked as the other two, had on its right or southern bank a belt of rudimentary dunes, barely half a meter high; these too were on saline soil. This third watercourse also ran parallel to the Kontsche-darja, being in fact a former bed of that stream, though in virtue of its greater age it was more obliterated. Contrary however to the other two, it possesses no forest on its left bank. In the case of the other two watercourses the attention is at once arrested by the fact that the dead forest stands, as it does in the case of the Kontsche-darja, on the left bank only, that is to say on the bank away from which the river is travelling. In the Kontschedarja the right bank is the one against which the pressure of the water is strongest, and consequently it is the one in the greater danger, and here it is that forest is wanting. There can be no doubt therefore that this arrangement of the forest is intimately connected with the migration of the river towards the right. The Kum-darja, with which we shall presently become better acquainted, affords the most luminous demonstration of the variability of the hydrography of the Lop country; similarly in these three dry watercourses we have a brilliant proof that the movement is still going on. In the first vol. we have ascertained that the Tarim
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