Southern Tibet : vol.7 / 521 ページ（カラー画像）

0521	Southern Tibet : vol.7
南チベット : vol.7

0521

Southern Tibet : vol.7

南チベット : vol.7

tributaries on the southern side run directly down from this Mustagh or Karakorum Range
but this was an error. The tributaries which they met with flow from the intermediate
range, and that and the Oprang River ¹ lie in between this northern branch of the Yarkand
River, which they explored, and the Mustagh Mountains. ²

Regarding the great watershed between Turkestan and India, Younghusband
asks why it should be called Karakoram.

Karakoram means »Black gravel», and no more inappropriate name could be imagined
for a range of the highest snowy peaks in the world. The name Karakoram was appa-
rently applied to it because of a pass to the eastward, where there is black gravel, or
something like it, is so called. But there is also a pass called Mustagh across the range.
Mustagh means 'ice-mountain', and surely that is a far more appropriate name for this
stately range of icy peaks, which form the watershed of Asia.³

Younghusband crossed the Saser-la and the Kara-korum Pass both in 1889
and 1890. As the route was well-known, he gives only a very short description
of it. On his map we see, however, that he went up the Shayok from Saser-la, thus
passing the snouts of the Kumdan Glaciers, which he does not mention. At any rate,
the road was not closed in 1889 and 1890. During these years Younghusband en-
larged, in many other directions, our knowledge of these complicated mountains. In
1889 he travelled westwards from Shahidullah. In the Sokhbulak Pass he crossed
the Aktagh Range of HAYWARD and saw the snowy range of the western Kwen-
lun to the east. At Chiragh-saldi the route of 1887 was struck. From Karaul he
went south over the Aghil Pass, and then followed the Oprang River north of K 2.
On the northern side of the Mus-tagh he visited a glacier 18 miles long.

Again he was struck by the dimensions of the Mus-tagh mountains:

Their appearance, indeed, was truly magnificent as they rose up in solemn grandeur
for thousands of feet above me, sublime and solitary in their glory, their sides covered with
the accumulated snow of countless ages, and their valleys filled with glistering glaciers.⁴

Regarding the Oprang River he made an important discovery:

The Oprang river, which we had thus followed to its junction with what is locally
known as the Raskam river, but which we usually mark on our maps as the Yarkand
river, might almost be called the main branch of the river which flows to Yarkand. It is
true that the more northerly branch is some 30 miles longer . . . . But the latter has quite
twice the volume of water of the former, on account of its receiving the drainage of the
vast glaciers in the vicinity of the Mustagh Pass.⁵

The two rivers join at Chong-jangal. One day's march from the Raskem River
Younghusband met GROMBTCHEVSKIY. Over the Ili-su Pass, 14,600 feet, Young-
husband entered Taghdumbash-Pamir and was struck by the great change in the

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