国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

sources. After leaving behind the watershed of the Keriya River at an elevation of close on 18,000
feet, we turned westwards for the exploration of the ground which figured generally in atlases as
a high plain with the name of 'Ak-sai-chin', but which the latest trans-frontier map of the Survey of
India rightly showed as a blank. Instead of a plain we found there high snow-covered spurs crowned
by peaks up to more than 23,000 feet, and between them broad barren valleys, descending from the
great range which overlooks the Yurung-kāsh headwaters from the south (Maps Nos. 22, 29, 33).
At the debouchure of these valleys there extends a series of large isolated basins, all at an elevation
between 15,000 and 16,000 feet, holding lakes mostly dry. It was fortunate that easy saddles lead-
ing over completely decomposed cross spurs facilitated progress over this dismal ground ; for owing
to its utter barrenness, which after the first lake (Map No. 29. D. 4) was passed left no longer even
a pretence of grazing, our ponies and donkeys, in spite of all care, succumbed here in rapid succession.

After a week of long marches from where we had left the track to the Lanak-lā a large salt lake Salt-en-
was reached which had been sighted from afar more than forty years before by a triangulation party crusted dry
of the Survey of India, but which had now dried up for the most part (Map No. 22. D. 4). Its basins.
approximate position was shown in the sketch-map intended to illustrate the route followed by
Mr. W. J. Johnson on his adventurous journey from Ladāk to Khotan in 1865. This prepared me
to look out for that old route, and after three more marches to the north-west across absolutely
sterile basins, holding salt-encrusted dry lagoons and without animal or plant life of any sort, we
struck its traces to my great relief (Map No. 22. B. 3). Two small stone-heaps, half-buried under
coarse sand and gravel, found at the mouth of a valley leading northward, were the first trace left
by human hands since we had crossed the Bābā-Hātim Pass to the Keriya River sources a fortnight
earlier.

The survival almost intact of these rough little cairns, of stacks of dead 'Burtse' roots found Relics of
higher up the valley, and of some other small relics left behind by those who followed this route Johnson's
during the few years (1864–6) it was open, was characteristic of the dryness of the climate even at route.
this great elevation. To find them in perfect preservation seemed striking proof how little of human
presence the desolate high plateaus just traversed of the extreme north-west of Tibet could have
seen ever since history began.

The track still perfectly well defined in most places, though not trodden by man for over forty Eastern
years, led to the pass which in Johnson's sketch-map was shown as 'Khitai-dawān', and by the even- headwaters
ing of September 18 we emerged at last in the valley of the eastern feeder of the Kara-kāsh. There- of Kara-
a shelter roughly built with unhewn stones marked the 'Hāji-langar' (Map No. 22. B. 1) of which kāsh River.
Satip-āldi Bēg, the old headman of the Kirghiz in the upper Kara-kāsh Valley, had told me as having
been built by Hāji Habīb-ullah's order, when this ill-fated rebel ruler of Khotan (1863–6) opened
his own route across the high K'un-lun Range south of Karanghu-tāgh to Ladāk. Two days later
I was joined lower down in the Kara-kāsh Valley by a party of Satip-āldi Bēg's Kirghiz with the
supplies and transport arranged for from Khotan. So the difficult expedition through the K'un-lun
ranges seemed now successfully ended.

But there still remained one exploratory task, all the more tempting to me because it offered Search for
also a quasi-historical interest. It was to trace Hāji Habīb-ullah's route up to the point where it Johnson's
crossed the main K'un-lun Range above Karanghu-tāgh by a high glacier pass, and thus to determine Yangi-
the exact position of the 'Yangi-dawān' of Johnson which our surveys of 1900 and 1906, carried out dāwān.
from the opposite side, had failed to reveal.¹⁴ For this purpose I marched back with the Kirghiz
and their yaks to below Hāji-langar, where a line of cairns that obviously continued the one found