not freeze to the bottom, are located at the street corners, and, according to Bellew, are filled at intervals by turning the stream into them. To the fastidious Occidental, the practice has certain disadvantages : the dust and dirt blown into the water are never cleaned out ; and in summer people wash not only their clothes but their bodies in the pools. At one place, Imamla, — and so far as I could learn, it is the only place in the Lop basin where the practice is followed, — the winter water supply comes from a " kariz," one of the tunnels common in West Turkestan. They are dug under a gravel flood-plain, and slope slightly less than the surface, so that they lie deeper and deeper under ground as they are followed up toward the head at the base of the mountains.
At first it seemed to me that the people of the Lop basin - Chantos, as the Chinese call them, and as I shall hereafter — were remarkably indifferent to cold. Time and again I saw men curled up under small sheep-skins sleeping soundly out of doors in zero weather. Experiments showed that I could readily do the same, and could sleep comfortably under a sheep-skin in the open air with a temperature of at least minus six degrees. The absence of wind, especially at night, makes the low temperature easily endurable. The natives like to keep warm, nevertheless. When we were camped where there were no houses, the guides or pony-men frequently waited about my tent at night to forestall one another in pouncing upon my fire as soon as I left it. They usually dug a shallow trench, put the live coals into it, covered them with three or four inches of soil, and slept on top.
IIIFカラー高解像度
