672 EXPLORATIONS IN MONGOLIA AND TIBET. 



country from Tibet, and is some 200 to 400 miles wide. Usually this re- 

 gion is called Northern Tibet, and though physically it belongs to that 

 country, from a political point it is a no-man's land, a desert waste over 

 which at rare intervals wander some robber bands that prey on pass- 

 ing caravans. 



It would take me too long to describe this part of my journey, in 

 which we crossed four chains of mountains of an average altitude of 

 about 16,000 feet. Between each of these, ia broad valleys running 

 from west to east, flow shallow rivers over beds of soft sand or gravel 

 in which we were forever getting bogged, we, our horses, and mules. 



Though we were in May and lovely June we had snow-storms and 

 hailstorms daily, the nights were bitterly cold, and in the middle of 

 the day the thermometer rose to the nineties. 



With no fuel but the droppings of wild yaks, with hardly any grass 

 for our animals, to which we had daily to feed balls of our jiarched 

 barley meal, it was no wonder we made slow progress, or that before we 

 had neared the inhabited regions of Tibet our supx)lies gave out and 

 we had to subsist for five days on tea alone. On the 7th of July we 

 saw for the first time black tents and I learned, on sending two of my 

 men to one of them, that we were among the Namru in ISTamru de, a 

 dependency of Lh'asa at the northwest corner of the great Tengri nor 

 (or, as the natives call it, Dolma Kam-ts'o). My plan had been to go 

 around this lake to the west, and had our provisions held out a fort- 

 night longer I have no doubt we would have succeeded, so sparce is the 

 population of this region, and reached our goal, Shigatse, the capital 

 of Ulterior Tibet. To accomplish my plan it was necessary to make 

 detours around every camp we sighted, for I knew of the stringent 

 orders issued by the Lh'asa government against admitting foreigners 

 onto their soil, and I entertained no hopes of seeing them modified in 

 my favor. Unfortunately our supplies did not hold out and so, when 

 we made these first Namru tents and asked for food we got only a 

 few haudfuls of tsamba and a little cheese. The news rapidly spread 

 that a small, but very suspicious looking party, had arrived from the 

 northern desert. The next day, after making some 12 miles more 

 in a southerly direction and reaching a broad valley dotted all over 

 with tents, we were stopped by the local headman and ordered to re- 

 main camped where we were until the officers of the Lh'asa govern- 

 ment, who resided about a day's ride away, could come and cross- 

 question us. 



This was on the 8th of July. By the 13th it had been decided that 

 I was to go under escort of a detachment of soldiers, not the way I had 

 planned, but by a circuitous route (of considerable geographical interest 

 however), to the higli-road leading to Lh'asa from Hsi-ning, joining it a 

 little to the north of the first Tibetan station, IS^agch'u or Nagch'u-k'a, 

 where there was a high official, a warden of the borders, who would 

 settle about my further movements. 



For ten days my escort took me in a general easterly direction over 



