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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
DECEMBER, 1909.
observations gatherel there, and subsequently on the marshes across the Baroghit to the Oxus, fully bore out the exactness of the topographical indications furnished by the official account of Kao-hsien-che's Expedition. As I stood on the glittering expanse of snow marking the top of the pass and looked down the precipitous slopes leading some 6,000 feet below to the head of Yasin Valley, I felt sorry that there was no likelihood of a monument ever rising for the brave Corean general who bad succeeded in moring thousands of men across the inhospitable Pamirs and over such passes.
2. The Baroghil Pass. On May 19 we crossed the Hindu-kush main range over its lowest depression, the Baroghil, ciro., 12,400 feet into the barren Upper Wakhan. Regard for the hardships already jo long undergone by my military hosts -and toucbing applications from the peaceful Wakbi villagers upon whom they were largely subsisting-urged me onwards, yet not before I had surveyed interesting ruins of fortifications intended to guard the route leading from the Baroghil, and probably of early Chinese origin.
3. The Route of Heüan-tsang in the Pamirs. Moving down the Taghdumbash Pamir, nine marches from Chitral, I found myself once more on the ancient route which sthan-tsang, the great Chinese pilgrim, bad followed when retorning in 649 A.D. from his long travels in India. I had traced his footprints before to so many sacred Buddbist sites, and was now setting out to follow them up so much further to the east, that I felt special gratification at being definitely able to identify here the rock fastness, where a curious local legend, related by the pilgrim, supposed an imperial princess from China to have been imprisoned in ancient days. The fortifications which I traced on the top of the almost completely isolated rock spar of Kixkurghan," the Princess's Tower," rising with precipitous crags fully 500 feet above a gloomy defile of the Taghdumbash River, must have been long in ruins already in Hsüan-tsang's days. Yet such is the dryness of the climate in these bigh valleys that the walls defending the only possible approach to this ancient place of refuge could still be clearly traced, in spite of the material being mere sun-dried bricks with regular layers of juniper twigs embedded between their courses.
At Tashkurghan, where I revisited the site of the old capital of Sarikol as described by Hsijan-tsang, I divided our party. Rai Ram Singh was sent off to carry on survey work in the eastern portion of the Muztagh-ata range, supplementary to our labours of 1900, while I myself moved on to Kashgar by the direct ronte across the high Chichiklik Dawan and a succession of minor passes. Rapid as my marches had to be-I covered the distance of close on 180 miles in six
lays in spite of serious difficulties on account of melting snows and flooded streams- I was able to ascertain by unmistakable topographical evidence that the route was the same which my Chinese pride and patron-saint, Hsüan-tsang, had followed more than twelve centuries ago.
4. The Pakhpo Nomads of the outer Kun-lun Hills. We turned eastwards from Yarkand and made our way through hitherto unsurveyed ground along the right bank of the Tiznaf River to the outer Kun-lun hills about Kök-yar. There, with my tent sheltered in a shady garden of the small oasis, with the barren mountains around assuring relative coolness, and yet near enough to the desert to receive almost daily a steady rain of fine dust carried up by the winds from the dunes and deposited here to form fresh loess, I worked hard for a fortnight. Besides finishing off the last literary tasks which bound me to Europe, I Cound my hands fully occupied with collecting anthropological measurements and data about the people of Pakhpo. It was no easy matter to get hold of these interesting hill nomads. At first they fought terribly shy of leaving their high valleys, just as if real live heads were to have been taken instead of mere measurements and photographs with perfectly harmless instruments. But the
