544 ACROSS DZUNGARIA 



information, obliged us to trust a guide to conduct us to 

 a village called Sa-veen. When, after a long, hot trek, 

 with much wandering amongst bogs, jungles, and rice- 

 fields, we eventually arrived there, we appeared to be 

 in altogether the wrong direction. We found travelling 

 in a straight line to be impossible, and moving without 

 a guide in such a country to be folly, so, after resting the 

 horses for a day and bribing a native of Sa-veen, — who 

 appeared to be so well off, owing to returns from rice- 

 culture, that he had no time for anything else but 

 gambling, — we moved westwards, hoping some day to 

 come within sight of the Jair Mountains. 



On leaving the vegetation-zone of the Manas River 

 barren, open steppe surrounded us ; yet, in spite of the 

 apparent aridity and the easy nature of the country, 

 we experienced considerable difficulty in our attempt 

 to cross these plains. The nature of the ground was, 

 over large areas, an expanse of salt-encrusted, friable 

 earth ; at every step the outer crust broke through, and 

 we sank deep into the soft, dusty earth beneath. The 

 fatigue thus occasioned made it most tedious for man 

 and beast ; whether wet or dry these soft, salty plains 

 formed obstacles of no small difficulty. Where water 

 approached the surface, dangerously soft ground bogged 

 the horses and made progress slow. It was almost 

 impossible to distinguish between the dry, saline earth 

 and the bog, for both were dry on the top, and for this 

 reason we repeatedly fell foul of them. The horses 

 went down like ninepins when the dry crust proved to 

 hide treacherous ground ; then they had to be unloaded, 

 pulled out of the soft, sticky bog, and loaded again ; 

 then the bog would be tried in another direction, — 

 with the same result of muddy horses and wet baggage. 



