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0254 The Pulse of Asia : vol.1
アジアの鼓動 : vol.1
The Pulse of Asia : vol.1 / 254 ページ(白黒高解像度画像)

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doi: 10.20676/00000233
引用形式選択: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

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are unusually small for Chinese Turkestan. I spent the
next five weeks in exploring the lower ends of the Niya,
Yartungaz, and Endereh rivers. All three furnished seem-
ingly conclusive evidence of a secular change of climate.
The whole country for six or seven hundred miles east of
Keriya is so scantily populated that the human factor can
in many cases be eliminated, and we are able to form an
exact estimate of the influence of purely physical causes
on the size and salinity of rivers and on the distribution
of life.

From Keriya I sent the camels directly to Niya, while I
went with the horses by way of the gold-mining town of
Sorgak. The town lies on the enormous fan delta of gravel
which the Niya River has deposited where it suddenly
emerges from the Kwen Lun mountains and crosses the
old fault-line to the relatively level basin floor. Sorgak pre-
sents the essential features of a mining town in the south-
western part of the United States. Perhaps it is a trifle
more barren and unattractive than the worst of our mining
towns, but from a distance it gives the same impression of
rawness to the traveler. It lies in a basin-shaped valley a
quarter of a mile or more from the edge of the deep gorge
of the Niya River, whence water must be brought up on the
shoulders of women, or the backs of donkeys. Not a ves-
tige of verdure can be seen, nothing but gravel with dug-
outs half buried in it. Here and there a blatantly new shanty
with a mud roof and an unseasoned wooden front stands
among the older, duskier structures. The population of
the region is said to be between three and four hundred
families, and the total number of men who work as miners,