National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

From the lake a river goes out to the south-east across an immense desert of this salt
and sand. At fifteen or twenty days' journey it passes under a mountain and re-appears on
the other side in China or Khitá. In olden times a young man of Lob went in his boat to
explore the river beyond the lake. After going down the stream for seven days he saw a
mountain ahead, and on going closer found the river entered a frightful black and deep chasm in
the rocks. He tried to stop his boat, but the swiftness of the current carried it into the chasm.
At its further end he saw a small black hole under the mountain, and had only time to lie down
in the bottom of his boat when it was drawn into this dark passage. The top of the boat
scraped the roof of the channel, and bits of stone continually fell upon him. After a long time
he emerged from the darkness into light and found the bottom of his boat strewed with
nuggets of gold. He went down the river for some days and landed in a country where the
people had only one eye, and this one eye was in the middle of the forehead, and brighter than
any two of other people. He wandered amongst them for six years and was then seized by
some Khitá soldiers and taken prisoner to Bájin. He lived there many years, and gradually
worked his way back with caravans stage by stage to Kámol and Karáshahr, and finally returned
to his own home an old grey bearded man after an absence of 22 years. All this is quite true,
and is known to everybody in Lob, where this man's descendents still live in the settlement of
Arámahalla or Arámyla as it is called. It is at the junction of the Aksú and Kúchá River with
the Tárim."

Karya Lake or Karya Kol is similar in general characters not to those above described,
but to the lesser lakes on the western half of the plain. It is said to be situated on the
desert south-west of Lob on the road to Khutan, beyond an intervening tract of sand hills,
and to receive the Karya River. It has no outlet, and in seasons of drought becomes a mere
boggy marsh. Its shores are covered with reeds and thickets of tamarisk and poplar, and are
frequented by shepherds who camp here for the sake of the pasture. Its reeds are the breeding
place of innumerable wild fowl.

Such are the chief physical features and natural divisions of the Káshghar territory, and
that their peculiarities materially determine the character of its climate and the nature of its
seasons will be readily understood. But before we proceed to consider these it will be profit-
able first to describe the political divisions of the country, because the artificial changes
wrought in them by the industry of man are not entirely without their share of influence in
modifying the effects of natural causes.

Political divisions.—The present political or governmental divisions of the Káshghar
territory are the same as those of ancient times, and have been determined by the natural
features of the country. They are all separated from each other by greater or less strips of
intervening arid desert waste; and each within its own limits forms a separate little State, with
its capital, and district towns, and rural settlements, the position, number and extent of which
are dependent on the course and distribution of its water supply. Each little State too, not-
withstanding the corrupting effects of foreign rule and intermixture, has its own peculiarities
of dialect, of dress, of social customs, and domestic habits. During a prolonged government
under a single rule the intercommunication between neighbouring States operates to blend or
obliterate these peculiarities, and consequently the distinctions are not so readily observable
between adjoining States as between those more widely separated. Yet they are observable as
a relic of the isolation that prevailed prior to and during the rule of the Chaghtáy Khans,
when in the recurring periods of anarchy of that time each little State formed an independent
principality at war with its neighbour, and was supported entirely by its own internal resources
of food, clothing, and means of defence. Moreover, although under the Chinese rule the
movements of troops and trade caravans backwards and forwards all over the country afforded
the people of the several States greater facilities of intercommunication than they ever enjoyed
before or have found available since, the natural obstacles of the road were sufficient to deter
any but men bound on business from the risks, and fatigues, and expenses of the journey.
Consequently even under favouring conditions the social isolation of these States has been only
a degree less than their local isolation.

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