Kwen Lun range, and from the high Tian Shan plateau and the Pamirs, make life easy and care-free, and the people are
mild and open-handed. In the Turfan basin, on the contrary, the struggle for life is more relentless; the farmer must search for every drop of water above ground and below. And so, as it seemed to me during my too brief stay of twenty days, the mildness of the Chanto immigrants from the Lop basin who have peopled Turfan has changed to stolidity; and their open-handed hospitality to grudging calculation of the chances of profit. The people are not rude, nor inhospitable; but because life is hard, they are careful as to how they waste their time and substance. It seemed to me, too, — though my own prepossession may have been father to the thought, — that in their indifference, their addiction to drugs, their more degrading vices, and perhaps in other ways, the people of Turfan have become slightly differentiated from their cousins in the Lop basin, and have become more like the Persians. Possibly the change is due to contact with the Chinese, and not, as I am inclined to believe, to physical circumstances.
However it may be as to the people, there can be no question as to the Persian character of the scenery. At Doksun, or "Ninety," the first town which we reached in Turfan, I found the days so warm at the end of February that the most pleasant place to sit at noon was on the flat mud roof. As I looked abroad over an ornamental parapet of sun-dried brick, a dreamy haze softened, but did not blur, the rounded outlines of the pale blue Desert Mountains to the south. Far to the north and west the snowy tops of higher peaks, rising 12,000 or 14,000 feet, gleamed fitfully
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