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0215 Innermost Asia : vol.2
Innermost Asia : vol.2 / Page 215 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000187
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Sec. ii]   TO P`O-CH`ÊNG-TZO AND SHINDI   731

2 to 4 feet. These, together with the dust haze which accompanied us since leaving Shindi, made

it abundantly clear that erosion by the wind had its share, though a minor one, besides decomposition

and erosion by water in the creation of the surface forms of this dreary Kuruk-tâgh region. Farther

on the stony Sai became absolutely barren, except where the Chikanda shrub could be seen in the

wide shallow beds that we had to cross in succession. They all joined a big depression skirting

the foot of the Charchak hills and draining towards Yârdang-bulak. In one of the flood-beds

dusk obliged us to halt for the night.

Until we approached close up to this point we had been able to follow the trail, still fresh looking, Track of

of a small party of hunters from Tikenlik whom Muhammad B5.gir knew of as having shot a wild wild camels.

camel, apparently towards the end of December, near the south-eastern extremity of the Charchak-

tagh. Before reaching our camping-place we noticed a wild camel's track running for some distance

close along this trail and evidently quite recent. This led to our guide offering an observation which

was not without a certain antiquarian interest. On his own hunting expeditions, he said, he had

noticed in those parts of the Kuruk-tâgh which wild camels visit that the animals are often in the

habit of keeping close to the hunters' trails leading from one salt spring to another. Needless

to say that the wild camels, with their extraordinary sense of locality and keen scent, do not adopt

this habit from any need of such human guidance. Whatever the explanation of it might be, and

Muhammad Baqir was not able to offer any, he was positive in asserting from his personal experience

that the wild camel was not afraid of human trails if these are more than a few days old. This

information was of interest as supporting what had suggested itself to me, when following the

line of the ancient Lou-lan route along the shore of the ancient Lop Sea north-west of Kum-

kuduk, as regards the significance of the much-trodden track of wild camels that keeps to it.'

It may be also recorded here that according to the information received by Muhammad Bâgir

from his father wild camels were in the latter's youth frequently to be found as far west as the

Kavûta valley, while now the vicinity of Charchak-tâgh and Yârdang-bulak is the western limit

of their haunts in the Kuruk-tâgh.

On the morning of March 4th we had marched only about six miles over ground as utterly Arrival at

barren as before, and crossed a low decayed ridge between two wide flood-beds, when almost suddenly Yard ang

we dropped down into a well-defined hollow sheltering the reed-beds which the salt spring of

Yardang-bulak, or Dolan-achchik as it is also known to the Singer people, provides with moisture.

They extend for about 500 yards from north to south with a width of about 150 yards across the

middle. The salt spring rises about 30o yards from their northern end, and the ice sheet it had

formed stopped just where we camped close to the lower end. I knew from Muhammad Bâgir's

statement and the account of Dr. Hedin who had visited Yârdang-bulak on his first journey to

Lou-lan in 1900, that grazing was better here than at Yaka-yardang-bulak, the other salt spring

near to the Kuruk-daryâ bed. So I decided to allow here the day of halt of which our camels and

men were in need, before starting for the exploration of the cemetery sites that Lal Singh had

discovered on his march along the Kuruk-daryâ in February, 1914.

There was plenty of work to keep us all busy while the camels and ponies were enjoying their Halt at

grazing, coarse as it was : the men had repairs of all sorts to do, and I myself much writing and map b lydang-

inking. There were anxious thoughts, too, to keep my mind occupied. Apart from the persistent

dust haze which I knew must be seriously impending Lai Singh's triangulation in the hills of the

western Kuruk-tâgh, I was in suspense also with regard to Afrâz-gul. If he had been able safely

to overcome the difficulties and risks attending his survey along the western shore of the Lop sea-

bed and across the sands of the Lop Desert, he ought about this time to be passing Yârdang-bulak

7 See above, i. pp. 316 sq.