accompanied our road for a considerable time. Judging by the sand that had accumulated at the bottom, they had long ago been abandoned to their fate. On the right of the road the ground is sandier. In two places on the road there were the ruins of sheds or houses and a couple of tuntai towers. Next to the latter there were two dune-like mounds of earth — evidently ruins. Soon after, i.e., 5 I /2 miles from the river, the cultivated area begins in a N—S direction. For several miles the road led through a neighbourhood like the one we had left behind us W of Kanchow.
In order to make it easier to gain the confidence of the Fan zy I had rcquested Ma Titai for a soldier. He was to meet me here from Li Yuan (Livenku), about 3o li to the W. As he had not turned up, I was forced to wait a day and send word to Li Yuan. The road to Yanga is said to be difficult at this time of year. — I spent Christmas eve reading some newspapers of last August which the consul had forwarded from Urumchi and which had reached me at Kanchow
My messenger returned yesterday morning with the news that two soldiers had left and would await me halfway to the lamasery. The place where it is situated is known as Kanglungsu, not Yanga, as I had been told. With some difficulty I found a guide among the local Chinese and we started at 8 a.m. It was a sunny day, though rather windy. We rode south for a couple of miles and then turned SSW, continuing in the same direction until we reached the mountains, where our course was WSW for the greater part of the journey. When we had covered 12/3 of a mile the cultivated area, thickly strewn with houses, gave way to a grassy slope rising gradually towards the mountains in the south. There were a few houses scattered over the bare slope. For the greater part of the distance to the mountains we rode along a dry, perfectly flat river bed which led us towards the mouth of a gorge that opened towards the E. We reached this 4 miles from the edge of the tilled area. From the mouth of the gorge the mountains extend to the SE in a number of small ridges of about the same height. On the right their course is NNW, almost N, and a pointed mountain rises from the very prominent group they form and towers above the rest. The river Hrargol or Ta ho winds along the bottom of the gorge, its channel, about 3 fathoms in width, being covered with ice at present. The river had dug itself a bed of about 200 fathoms in breadth, to the right steep bank of which the road led. Above these steep banks rose slight conglomerate heights on either side which soon became considerable mountains. The road soon led us across the frozen channel to the opposite bank and immediately back again to the bank along which we had been riding. This little manoeuvre was repetaed incessantly throughout the day.
The banks grew stonier, the deeper we penetrated into the gorge, and the ice, if possible, more slippery. Some trees grew in the river bed at the mouth of the gorge, which some Chinese were felling and conveying to the plain in the form of logs, tied in pairs to the back of a donkey, while the other end of the log dragged along the ground Further up the gorge we met several such donkey caravans with logs from the neighbourhood of Kanglungsu. Either one of our horses would slip and stretch full-length or a donkey with its pair of logs would fall helpless on the slippery ice. Fortunately, the ground was free from snow,
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