296 FROM KASHGAR TO ALICHUR PAMIR CH. XIX
exceptionally hardy ponies as Colonel Yagello's orders secured for me at the few Kirghiz camps encountered. There was, however, abundant reward in the mass of interesting geographical observations to be gathered and in the splendid views which it offered into a region little explored and in parts still inadequately surveyed.
As far as the Tanimaz river, a large tributary of the Murghab rising on the Great Pamir, our route led past a grand glacier-clad range which forms as it were the northwestern buttress of the Pamirs (Fig. i28). It is known to the Kirghiz vaguely as Sel-tagh or Muz-tagh, `the Ice Mountain'. Rarely have my eyes in the Himalaya, Hindukush or K`un-lun beheld a sight more imposing than the huge glacier-furrowed wall of the Muz-tagh as it rose before me with magnificent abruptness above the wide torrent-bed of the Muk-su, after I had crossed the Trans-Alai by the Tars-agar, our first pass from Daraut-kurghan. Its boldly serrated
crest-line seemed to rise well above 21,000 feet, and in- I
dividual ice-clad peaks to reach a great height above it.
No approximately exact elevations had up to that time 1 been determined with the theodolite or clinometer for this and some other prominent ranges towering above the western portion of the Pamirs and the valleys draining them into the Oxus. Neither Afrazgul nor I myself could help feeling regret again and again at the obvious considerations which precluded any attempt at survey work on Russian ground, however modest in scope. But even without this it appeared to me that the height reached by the main summit of the Muz-tagh massif was distinctly greater than that of Mount Kaufmann on the Trans-Alai. It was hence a distinct satisfaction to me when I learned that a Russo-German
IIIF Color HighRes
