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The Pulse of Asia : vol.1 |
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seemed at first to be the sandy desert of the heart of Asia;
but during the two hours of our stay on the pass, it ex-
panded and rose, and we then knew it for the inevitable
dust-haze which shrouds the country more than half the
year.
We were looking down into the great enclosed basin
which, as the map of Asia shows, occupies the very centre
of the continent. It stretches east-northeast for fourteen
hundred miles from Kashgar to Su-Chow, and has a maxi-
mum breadth from north to south of over four hundred
miles. Except to the northeast, toward the Desert of Gobi,
where there is a region of low, maturely dissected moun-
tains, the basin is sharply bounded by lofty, newly uplifted
plateaus, diversified with mountains which rise to a height
of from 15,000 to 25,000 feet. The edges of the plateaus
are marked by steep ranges, such as that of Kwen Lun on
the south, forming the northern escarpment of Tibet and
the Karakorum plateau, those of the heights of the Pamirs
on the west, and the southern range of Tian Shan on the
north. Within the ring of encircling mountains, the basin
floor is composed of a broad desert zone of gravel surround-
ing a zone of vegetation in which most of the villages and
towns are situated, and which in turn surrounds a great
central desert tract of sand and salt. The entire basin,
which is as large as the portion of the United States east
of Lake Michigan and north of Tennessee (three times as
large as Great Britain and Ireland), drains to the salt lake
of Lop-Nor. At least it would drain thither, if most of the
streams did not wither to nothing in vast slopes of gravel
and plains of sand. The principal river, the Tarim, or
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