CHAPTER XCII
IN THE GORGES OF POLUR AND ZAILIK
FIVE long marches brought me from the edge of the Khotan oasis to the mountain village of Polur, where the westernmost route from Tibet debouches. We were now steadily ascending in a diagonal line the great gravel glacis which slopes down from the northern main range of the Kun-lun (see Map II.), and I felt with delight how each night's halt gave increased coolness.
On August 5th we struck at Hasha the first of those submontane oases, narrow but long-stretched, which line the beds of a succession of glacier-fed rivers where they debouch from the foot-hills. At Hasha, as well as at Chakar and Nura, cultivation had evidently not yet reached the limits of the available water. Yet attentive Muhammad Yusuf Beg, who since 1906 had been transferred to this
Hill ' district from Niya, told me that the official reckoning of households in the whole of this wide tract had multiplied about nine-fold since the re-establishment of Chinese rule in 1878. Earlier changes of this kind in the extent of cultivation were indicated by remains of a small roughly built town of uncertain date which I found near Hasha, between two steep-scarped river beds in a position recalling Yarkhoto, and by a débris area, manifestly of Buddhist times, below Nura. It was at the latter place that the magnificent line of snowy peaks to the south first showed itself in full glory.
At the pretty cluster of little oases known as Imamlar I visited the well-shaded shrine, famous as a pilgrimage-place throughout the Tarim Basin, where pious belief has located the resting-place of four of those legendary Imams, or early
IIIF Color HighRes
