THE KARAKORUM PLATEAU 89
related as we sat under a mulberry tree in a narrow valley at the northern base of the Kwen Lun mountains, contained an epitome of the geography of Asia. The component elements of his conception were first himself and his Chanto people, the mild, courteous, not over-valiant, and none too honest product of generations of life in the sheltered, uninspiring environment of irrigated oases among the deserts of Central Asia. Closely connected with his daily life was the government, of whose rapacious officials he mildly complained : the Chinese, whose slow, imperturbable, ever-persistent tenacity and economy are perhaps the result of thousands of years of the dull, hard struggle of a teeming population against overcrowding in a land of splendid possibilities, uninfluenced by great changes either from within or from without. A more important factor in his life was his religion, the fanatical creed which seems to have imbibed its nature from the stern inexorableness of the desert, on the one hand, and the utter relaxation of the oasis, on the other. Drawn by religious zeal, and repelled by Chinese stolidity, our mild Chanto pilgrim started westward on his first pious journey, following the easy route along the line of oases at the northern base of the great central mountain system of Asia to the Caspian Sea, and so across Trans-Caucasia to the Black Sea and Arabia, and finally back again. There was much that he liked, and the railroad was a keen delight; but he could not understand the inquisitive, aggressive new race of fair-haired men from the north, and could not protect himself from the half-Russianized races who fleeced him right and left. When again he was about to go to Mecca, he heard of new factors, a race
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