them, says, »Throughout the day storms continued to rage around us amidst the adjacent hills, but, fortunately, none fell actually over us.» On the loth July he writes: »the whole country appeared to be changing for the better, ... everywhere there was more grass growing.... We were, too, making a very gradual descent, and felt convinced that, with such natural signs, we must before very long hit upon streams which would lead us to some sort of civilization.»
The following information is important for the mapping of Wellby's route. »Just after leaving Camp 62, we were all struck with wonderment at finding a track running almost at right angles to our own route. It was so well defined, and bore such unmistakable signs of a considerable amount of traffic having gone along it, that we concluded it could be no other than a high road from Turkestan to the mysterious Lhassa, yet the track was not more than a foot broad. Our surmises, too, were considerably strengthened when we found the entire leg bone of some baggage animal, probably a mule, for still adhering to the leg was a shoe. This was a sure proof that the road had been made use of by some merchant or explorer. ...»
This route was, as Dr. B. Hassenstein showed on the general map to my former journey, none other than the track made by Dutreuil de Rhins's caravan of 1893 and by Littledale's of 1895. I have said in Vol. III, that my Camp No. VIII in the 1896 journey was on Littledale's route. From that point he travelled south by precisely the same route that Dutreuil de Rhins and Grenard had used two years before. The point at which Wellby and Malcolm intersected their route lies immediately south of the lake which Grenard calls Lac No. 4. From that point De Rhins and Littledale diverged, the former travelling south, the latter south-east. Fortunately the signs of their passage were still so distinct at the time of Wellby's journey, that they afford an excellent means of checking his route on the map. We shall return to Lac No. 4 when we come to deal with Grenard's journey. Wellby, who intersected it in its southern part, says of it, »A mile or so farther on we came to the dried up salt bed of a very ancient lake. The salt was in every shape and form of crustation, and the whole lake for several miles across was divided up into small squares with walls one to three feet high, rugged and irregular. The going across this was troublesome and arduous....» Further on: »The following morning we came to a most dreary-looking region, ornamented only with a big salt lake, without any vegetation or kind of life, making us eager to get across such a solitude.»
On the 27th July they forded a river flowing towards the north and coming down from a mountain range stretching east and west and overtopped by big snowy peaks, from whose glaciers and snow-fields a number of brooks gathered into the principal river, which itself empties into a lake of medium size. In that region the grazing was excellent. There too they found three stones arranged in the form of an old fire-place. After that they travelled towards the east-south-east, still in the same immense latitudinal valley, which is separated by the Koko-schili mountains from the latitudinal valley that lies to the north of it and in which I travelled a month later, bearing in this same locality also east-south-east. On the 3 I st July they forded a smaller stream, which came off the snowy mountains just mentioned and emptied
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