140 CHINESE TURKESTAN 



fairly good hotel, called the " Numero Thumentso." 

 The town is a good one, and there are shops of all 

 sorts, but not much in the way of sights to interest 

 a traveller. 



Morse now took the train for Batoum, and I 

 started on my return journey to Kuldja. I had 

 bought two sledges so as to avoid the trouble of 

 shifting all my belongings at each stage, the post 

 conveyances being only used on the stage they 

 belong to. I did the journey in fourteen days, in 

 spite of delay occasioned by another buran; but to 

 do it in such a short time involved a lot of night 

 work, and it was colder than ever ; there was no 

 possibility of keeping warm, the question being to 

 keep alive. Between Chimkent and Ali-outai there 

 had been a great storm, and the road was awful. 

 Sometimes we stuck in drifts, when the united 

 efforts of both teams were required to extricate the 

 sledges one at a time, and on one occasion my 

 sledge got upset in the dry bed of a stream, and 

 gave us much trouble to haul it out. The traffic 

 had been completely blocked for a time, and all 

 the post-houses were full of travellers, many of 

 them frost-bitten ; so my progress on this part of 

 the road was very slow, only two or three stages a 

 day, and that chiefly by dint of hiring private 

 horses when the post-horses were all engaged. 

 One thing is certainly well done, and that, as I 

 have already said, is the horsing. There might be 



