to sixty armed men, with yaks. The shore-line at that side is rather irregular and ragged, being broken into a great number of small bays, lagoons, and peninsulas, the latter always stretching from east to west. This lake was nowhere frozen, its water being very salt; but along the shore are found a number of ice-bound pools, which owed their existence to springs and were surrounded by wretched grass. Fragments of calcareous tufa were common everywhere; in fact, they were sometimes so numerous that they impeded our advance. There the only surviving strand-terrace of those which I have mentioned was the lowest one, and it runs quite close to the existing water-line. Of the upper terraces we could see nothing except faint fragmentary traces in one or two places. The lowest terrace, spurs of which we crossed over at intervals, is low, and possibly the lake, when at its highest, reaches right up to its foot. In the south-west rose a dominating bluff called Gogin-gila, with just a trace of snow on it. The northern mountains are cut through by a transverse glen, overlooked on the west by the peak S3. The lake narrows towards the west, and finally comes to an end altogether, and is succeeded by a level gypsum expanse. At the western end of the basin, where we formed Camp CXX, though the grass was extremely thin, we found however a small isolated sheet of water. Here again we encountered mounds and pyramids of gypsum, though the area covered by them was but small.
Of the names that appear in the western parts of Littledale's map, the men of Rudok knew only three, namely Alung-gangri, Roksun, and Rundor; the others they said they had never heard speak of. This may of course have been due as much to their own ignorance as to misconception on the part of Littledale. They also gave me four other names as belonging to the northern route which we were now about to follow — names that we did not come across, namely Jaghing, Bagmadiclschi, Lam-lung, and Danse. Our informant was a hostile chieftain; but the escort were all friendly disposed and pleasant men, whose statements may, I think, be implicitly relied upon. They called the little lake, beside which we pitched Camp CXX, the Oring-tso and the next one to the west of it the Batsa-singi. They were also acquainted with the name of Tsollaving-tso, and added that that lake lay farther east, as in fact it did. It is however strange that they should have two different names for the same sheet of water in one and the same depression, unless indeed this is only a repetition of what holds good in the case of the Perutse-tso, and the two different names apply to identically the same lake, so that what the eastern Tibetans call the Tsolla-ring-tso is known to the Rudok Tibetans as Oring-tso.
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