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0323 The Pulse of Asia : vol.1
The Pulse of Asia : vol.1 / Page 323 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000233
Citation Format: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR Text

us into an unfrozen, watery salt-bog in zero weather, in a
region so cold and dry that we were carrying ten or twelve
days' supply of ice for drinking-water. If the mud had been
a little softer, we should have lost the camels and perhaps
ourselves. If we had ventured to traverse the soft, smooth
areas to the west of our line of march across the great salt
plain, we should probably have found ourselves in danger
of being swallowed up on every side, and might never have
returned to corroborate the Chinese tales of bottomless
muck.
On the fourth morning of our weary march, we were
cheered by encountering a shore-line, marked by a steep
bluff thirty feet high. On climbing to its top, we supposed
that we had left the old lake-bed behind. After walking a
quarter of a mile among æolian mesas of clay, however, we
dropped down another bluff, and were in the salt plain again.
We had crossed a finger-shaped peninsula, ten or twenty
times as long as it was wide. All that day and till noon of the
next we encountered similar peninsulas, or elongated islands,
separated by bays and sounds of similar dimensions. The
axes of all were directed northeast and southwest, as the map
shows. Apparently, during a dry interfluvial epoch preced-
ing the last marked expansion of the lake, the violent winds
of the region, which prevailingly blow from the northeast,
had carved out great hollows between countless mesas, as
they are doing now in many other places. Later, when the
lake again expanded, it penetrated the hollows and widened
them into a network of parallel sounds and bays, dotted
with an archipelago of elongated islands and peninsulas.
The flat-topped islands, with steep red and green bluffs