214 HEADWATERS OF YURUNG-KASH [CHAP. XIII.
nerves more. As it was, I felt heartily glad when I saw the ponies safely on the other side. Karanghu-tagh means " Mountain of blinding darkness," and at the time of our approach the appropriateness of the name could not have been doubted. For about an hour we and our tired beasts groped our way between the boulder-strewn bank of the Kash stream and the foot of steep hill-slopes before we reached at last the village that bears that cheerful name. The baggage had arrived safely, but also with great delay, and thus it was late in the night before I could retire to rest.
The 24th of October was spent at Karanghu-tagh, where arrangements had to be made for men and yaks to take us further into the mountains. The survey of the previous day had shown me that the only way by which the source of the main branch of the Khotan River might possibly be approached would lie in the gorge of the river itself. The Yüzbashi and the old men of the little village, whom I summoned in the morning, at first denied stoutly that the valley of the Yurungkash was accessible beyond the point where we had crossed it. By-and-bye, however, I elicited the fact that there were summer grazing-grounds in some of the nullahs descending from Murtagh, and then the fact of their being reached by a track up the Yurung-kash had to be acknowledged. Of a route across the main range south, by which Mr. Johnson appears to have come on his rapid descent from Leh to Khotan in 1865, I could get absolutely no information. It was evident that the hill-men feared the trouble and exposure of a tour in those high regions. At the sanie time the serious and very puzzling discrepancies I discovered between the sketch-map of Mr. Johnson's route and the actual orography of the mountains south of Pisha convinced me that I could not dispense with local guidance. My interest, however, lay eastwards where the course of the Yurung-kash was to be traced. After a time Islam Beg, a young and energetic attendant of the Khotan Yamen, whom Pan-Darin had despatched with me,
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