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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
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The heart of a continent : vol.1 |
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plot near a stream of cold clear water, and under a small grove
of trees. It really seemed the height of bliss—a perfect
paradise, and the desert journey a terrible nightmare behind
me. The singing of the birds, too, struck me very much;
for in the Gobi there was always a death-like silence, and so
I noticed the continued twitter which the birds kept up.
Trees were more numerous now, and on the northern slopes of
some of the hills I even saw some patches of pine forests.
I was hoping, after crossing the Tian-shan, to come upon a
comparatively well-populated country, with a fair extent of
cultivated land; but was disappointed at finding the same
barren desert as before, with, however, a small oasis every
fifteen or twenty miles. The inhabitants were principally
Tunganis and Chinese, and looked very poor; but the Turkis
were all fine, healthy-looking men.
On July 22 we passed a small square-walled town called
Ching-cheng, surrounded by fields of wheat and some good
grass land, but when these ended the desert began again directly.
A long way off over the desert we could see a couple of
poplar trees rising out of the plain. These poplars are very
common all over Chinese Turkestan, and they make excellent
landmarks. We reached these at twelve at night, and found a
few soldiers stationed there, who said that Hami was still a
long way off. Now, as my constant inquiry for the last month
had been, "How far are we from Hami?" and as the guide for
the last few days had each time said we were only sixty miles
off, I was rather exasperated to find that, instead of having
ten or twenty miles more to get over, there was still a good
fifty. So on striking camp at two the following afternoon, I
told my men that my tent would not be pitched again till
Hami was reached, so they had better prepare themselves for a
good march. We travelled on all through the afternoon—a
particularly hot one; then the sun set before us, and still we
went on and on through the night till it rose again behind us.
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461
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471
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482
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