SKETCH OF NICHOLAS PBEJEVALSKI. 403 



hardships. On one side looms up the desert, with its sand-storms, its 

 dearth of water, its heat and cold ; on another side, the European 

 encounters a suspicious, harharous people, who will meet him in am- 

 bush or be his open enemies. After three years of contention with 

 these difficulties, he had the rare fortune of reaching the Kuku-Nor and 

 the upper waters of the Yang-tse-Kiang River in Thibet. He had only 

 to lament the insufficiency of his outfit, a matter of great importance 

 in all explorations. Yet, with the • means he had, he carried the line 

 of his journey thirty-three hundred miles forward with the aid of a 

 hand-compass, defined eighteen meridians on his map, and observed 

 the magnetic variation at nine points and the horizontal deviation at 

 seven. Meteorological observations were taken four times a day, 

 the temperature of the ground was tested frequently, and hygromet- 

 ric observations were taken several times. Special attention was 

 given to physiographical investigations and the examination of the 

 mammals and birds, and every opportunity for ethnographical re- 

 search was improved. The expedition collected specimens of two 

 hundred and thirty-eight species of birds, skins of forty-two spe- 

 cies of mammals, a dozen amphibia, eleven species of fishes, and 

 more than three thousand insects. These were all deposited in the 

 Museum of the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. The botani- 

 cal collections, wLich were handed over to the Imperial Botanical 

 Gardens, included some four thousand examples, of five or six hun- 

 dred species. The mineralogical collection comprised small specimens 

 from all the ranges that were crossed. 



The route of this expedition was from Kiakhta to Peking, where 

 the outfit was completed, thence along the southeastern border of 

 the Mongolian table-land north of Peking to the city of Dolon-Nor, 

 across the Dulai-Nor Lake to Kalgan and the Yellow River, and 

 thence over an Alpine region and across the Hoang-ho to Ordos in its 

 valley. From this place it went to the marshy Zaidemin Lake, and 

 thence to the Ala-Shan, or the southwestern part of the Desert of 

 Gobi, a barren region, inhabited by a Mongolian tribe, the Oleuts, and 

 to the Ala-Shan Mountains, a range in places exceeding ten thousand 

 feet in height, and which is the home of the musk-ox. High as 

 these mountains are, they possess an abundant animal life. Unfortu- 

 nately, the explorer's funds were exhausted at this point, and his 

 pass from the Chinese Government extending only to the province of 

 Shan-Su, there seemed to be no alternative but to retire to Kalgan in 

 Southeastern Mongolia. The expedition returned along the left shore 

 of the Yellow River, through the country of the Urotes, visiting on 

 the way the great salt lake Jaratai Dabaru, whence salt is carried to 

 China. The return was beset with many difficulties, but Kalgan was 

 reached at last, and the first part of the expedition was completed, 

 with results on the whole so satisfactory that the travelers, though 

 still in the interior of Asia, determined to undertake a journey to the 



