his charming wife in, their home. The porridge, Christmas cakes, home-brewed ale and even an imitation of a codfish made us think we were spending Christmas in the North. It was delightful to see the number of trays laden with fruit and sweets that were presented to the doctor and Mrs. Raquette. I was given some presents, too, an embroidered handkerchief case and an excellent craniometer. It was a great achievement to produce such an instrument in Yarkand
December 28th. During the last few days I have done nothing but study Chinese and read a little. It was
Yarkand easy for the Raquettes to persuade me to be lazy and have dinner and supper with them. To-day I visited the village of Hayran Bagh (the startled garden), the headquarters of the Abdals of the Yarkand district. I was received very differently from the hospitable Yuzbashi in Tamaghil. The villagers were very reserved and avoided me on all kinds of pretexts. I had some difficulty in collecting a mullah and about 15 Abdals in order to make anthropological measurements. However, there were some immigrants among these 15, who did not belong to the tribe, and others of mixed origin, their mothers being descended from Sarts, so that when it came to the point and a couple of men, who were too old, were eliminated, there were no more than 6 skulls to measure. — The village consists of 5o houses, and judging by the number of cattle and the lean and miserable appearance of the people, they seem to be very poor. Marriage with people of a different origin seems to be no rarity, a circumstance that would appear to threaten this little tribe with extinction, at any rate here. It was impossible to get any of them to tell me anything about the history of their tribe. They all, even the mullah, affected to be ignorant and said that they knew nothing beyond what the mullah had once heard read from an old book in the courtyard of the yamen, i.e. practically nothing. They tried to make out that they were of the same origin as the rest of the population. Besides the Sart language they knew no other etc. — To-morrow I start for Kashgar with Raquette.
We started yesterday morning with Raquette as arranged, but instead of riding each of us rolled along comfortably in an arbah. Nothing remarkable occurred on the road which constantly crosses ariqs, the largest of which, quite a respectable river (Opa Upa (Hurfa?) üstang) cuts across the road about z 1/2 paotai from the town. The road is good, the bridges likewise. About halfway to Kök Rabat the road leads across a large plain, overgrown with bad grass, marshy in some places and turning into a swamp. There are said to be many wild boars here. I felt rather inclined to spend the night at Qara Qum and hunt boar the next day, but as the kitchen had left a couple of hours in advance, that settled the matter and we decided instead to spend a day at Kök Rabat and shoot kiyik (wild goat). The hunt materialized to-day. We started at about 8 with two natives as guides and beaters. We saw many tracks on the thin layer of snow that partially covered the sandheaps in the desert, but our search seemed to be in vain. At 1.3o we were on the point of turning back, when the natives suddenly caught sight of two antelopes grazing about a mile and a half off. They posted Raquette, the Cossack and myself very knowingly and drove the animals towards us. The Cossack proved the most fortunate. The antelopes
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