glaciers which we had then sighted at the heads of the side valleys draining the high Kun-lun range south of the Yurung-kash, but had been unable to approach owing to the advanced season and the want of adequate transport.
Another object I had kept my eyes upon was to clear up the doubts about the difficult and long-disused route by which Johnson in 1865, on his plucky visit to Khotan from the westernmost Tibetan plateaus, had been taken across the high snow-mountains south of Karanghu-tagh. Our explorations of 1900 had revealed very puzzling discrepancies between the sketch-map illustrating Johnson's journey and the actual orography of this region, and the obstinate reticence of the Karanghu-tagh hill-men had prevented any clue to the true location of his route. There was little reason to hope that their obstructive attitude would have undergone any material change. But now we had at least succeeded, by prolonged cross-examination of the herdsmen at Mitaz and Chash, in eliciting that there was ` behind the mountains ' a high valley called Brinjaga, to which the ` Bais of Karanghu-tagh ' were believed to send their yaks for summer grazing. The admission seemed encouraging ; for this local name, of which all knowledge had been stoutly denied on occasion of my first explorations, actually figured in Johnson's route sketch as the designation of a valley he had passed through before reaching Karanghu-tagh.
On Karanghu-tagh, as the chief place of the small settlements of Taghliks and criminals exiled from Khotan who form the only population in this desolate mountain region, we depended for supplies, transport, and guides. So I lost no time in summoning its head-man. The old Yüz-bashi, whose passive resistance had caused so much worry in 1900, had died in the interval. But his successor, a good-looking young fellow, who duly arrived in the evening of our day's halt near Nissa, seemed equally inclined to such tactics. I confronted him with the admission made by the Mitaz men as to Brinjaga, and tried to convince him that continued professions of ignorance would only result in our prolonged stay in his valleys and additional trouble to himself. The argument seemed to
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