be sensibly disturbed by the sheep's demands for food and shelter. Yet we think that in Yarkand and Khotan our purchases were made at rates not inordinately above the market. Our ordinary ponies cost an average of about $17. For special mounts of excellent blood we went as high as $35, and in one case $50. Big coats of undressed sheepskin, carrying the wool, cost about $2 each ; native shoes, a sort of high-quartered moccasin, cost fifty cents each. Saddles of painted wood, with excellent felt pads, complete with girths, stirrup, and bridle, cost Blo. Pack-saddles, shaped like a long letter U and filled with straw (ah, how it burned up there on the cold plateau, when the horse lay stiff on the sand !), cost about one dollar each. Wheat was approximately forty cents per bushel, and the bread made by the natives was excellent and seemed to be abundantly provided in the bazaars of all considerable places. Meat also, in the large towns, was apparently plentiful, market and butchery being generally combined in one unedifying shop.
Silk carpets, for which in old days Khotan was famous, are not as fine as those made in Persia. Even here the mineral dye has done its meretricious work. We saw a very big carpet in the making for some equally big mandarin. Part of its hundred feet of length was rolled around a beam resting on the ground, thence rising to a yard-arm fixed athwart the top of a tall tree-trunk. Forty feet of width exposed a brilliant but well controlled design. The industrious workmen sit under a rainless sky and quietly weave the giant fabric. What clattering of looms, what paling of faces, what straining of nerves would
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