IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Cathay and the Way Thither : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
To CATHAY.
CHAPTER XII.
The remainder of the Journey to Cathay, and how it is ascertained to be all the same as the Chinese empire.
HIARCHAN, the capital of the kingdom of Cascar, is a mart of much note, both for the great concourse of merchants, and
Sacrithma may represent a station which appears in Macartncy's map on the mountains near the head of the Oxus as SARIKEAEE. Wilford makes some wild work with this name Sacrithma, quoting Goes, in his essay on the " Isles of the West" in vol. viii of the As. Researches. The ridge to which Goes applies the name must be that which separates the Sirikul from the headwaters of the Yarkand River. Sarcil may then be, as Ritter surmised, the district of SARIKUL near the said headwaters (see Russ. in Cent. Asia, p. 157 ; Ritter, vii, 489, 505 ; iii, 635). Ciecialith (i.e. Chechalit) is then without doubt that spur of the Bolor running out towards Yarkand, which appears on some recent maps of Asia as the CHICHECK TAGH, and in Klaproth's map cited by Ritter as Tchetchetlagh, immediately north of Sarikul. The passage of this great spur is shown very distinctly in a route laid down in Macartney's map (in Elphinstone's Caubul), only the author supposed it to be the main chain of the Kara Korum. Macartney terms the Col of which Goes gives so formidable an account, the Pass of Chiltung, and a station at the northern side of it CHUKAKLEE, which is probably the Chechalith of our traveller.
Tanghetar I had supposed to be a mistranscription for Yanghetar, i.e, Ingachar or YANGI-HISAR, an important town forty-seven miles S.E. of Kashgar on the road from that city to Yarkand, an error all the more probable as we have Tusce for Yusce a little further on. Tanghetar, however, appears in Macartney's map, and immediately beyond he represents the road as bifurcating towards Kashgar and Yarkand. It must in any case be near Yengi-Hisar if not identical with it. Yaconic I cannot trace.
Ritter is led by the slight resemblance of names to identify the Charchunar of Goes with Karchu, near the upper waters of the Yarkand, and this mistake, as it seems to me, deranges all his interpretation of the route of Goes between Talikan and Sarikul.
Goes in a letter from Yarkand to Agra spoke of the great difficulties and fatigues encountered in crossing this desert of Pamech (PAMIR), in which he had lost five horses by the cold. So severe was it, he said, that animals could scarcely breathe the air, and often died in consequence. As an antidote to this (which, of course, was the effect of attenuated atmosphere rather than of cold) the men used to eat garlic, leeks, and dried apples, and the horses' gums were rubbed with garlic. This desert took
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