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| 0377 |
The Pulse of Asia : vol.1 |
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and the minimum minus five, which is probably unusually
high, since I found a temperature of minus two in March.
Snow never falls: at least, my host at Doksun said that dur-
ing the forty years of his life he had never seen any there,
although it falls yearly on the mountains round about.
Rain, he added, is almost equally rare. Once or twice each
summer it falls in sufficient quantity to wet the ground,
though not to run. Once in ten years or so, there is a cloud-
burst, and raging floods ruin fields and houses.
In order to see as much of Turfan as possible in a short
time, I undertook to go around the periphery of the basin
with the horses, sending the camels to the capital, also called
Turfan, to be sold. It proved impossible to go south of the
lake because there is no water, but north of it there was so
much water that three horses once became almost inextri-
cably stuck in the mud, and we were forced to follow a very
crooked route. At Deghar, the most eastern village of Tur-
fan, we found a queer anomaly. Although the village lies
in an almost rainless region at the foot of some of the highest
sand dunes in the world, it not only has suffered from occa-
sional floods, but the houses have to be rebuilt every five
years because they sink into the mud. The plain of Turfan
is so flat that in spring underground water from the moun-
tains converts hundreds of square miles into impassable
muck. It might be expected that plants would grow abun-
dantly, as in the zone of vegetation of the Lop basin. So
they do, to a certain extent, and have done much more
extensively in the past. On the whole, however, the water
dries up so early in the season that only camel-thorn and a
few reeds can flourish.
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