dollars and twenty cents) per month. Other expenses were correspondingly low, even though Subhana considered it necessary for his two " Sahibs " to have five or six pounds of " soup-meat " a day and other articles in corresponding amounts. There always seemed to be great quantities to " throw away," as Subhana carefully phrased it, when he carried things off to the crowded kitchen-boat. Nevertheless, our seventeen days in a house-boat proved economical. They also, I regret to say, proved cold and uncomfortable, because of the time of the year.
We had come to • Kashmir from Bombay. On leaving the railroad at Rawal Pindi in northern India, our plan was to cross the Himalaya mountains to the vicinity of Lake Pangong, three hundred miles to the east, at the extreme western end of Tibet. There we proposed to turn to the north, and traverse the lofty western extension of the Tibetan plateau to the Kwen Lun mountains, a hundred miles away on its northern edge. If we could cross a favorably located pass over the mountains, a further march of seventy-five miles as the crow flies would bring us to the Chanto oasis of Khotan in Chinese Turkestan, where the most important part of our work would begin. We followed this plan as closely as the circumstances would permit, but the exigencies of travel, combined with the demands of geographic investigation, caused us to journey twice as far as the distances specified above. The main features of our route appear on the map at the end of this volume. Leaving Rawal Pindi March 13, 1905, we reached Srinagar March el, and remained there till April 4, when we started for Leh, the capital of Ladakh, where we arrived April 24.
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