324 GEOGRAPHIC LITERATURE 



region is sparsely inhabited by patriarchal and often migratory Kirghiz 

 tribes of pastoral habit; travel is possible for horses and for camels, 

 but the higher districts and snowier stretches repel all burden-beasts save 

 the mountain-born yak, whose peculiar capacities made possible some 

 valuable work. Save for a single earlier Asian journey, the Pamir survey 

 was the author's apprenticeship in exploration, and this part of his itin- 

 erary is rich in detail and plentifully seasoned with adjectives ; yet it is 

 a surprise, in view of the altitude and latitude (no less than the adjectives), 

 to find the " inconceivable " cold of Hedin's lowest thermometric record 

 — 36.8° Fahrenheit, and the." incredible" depth of soil-frost three and a 

 half feet — in many ways a striking contrast to the congealed mercury and 

 six feet of soil-frost in the upper Mississippi valley last winter. Dr 



Hedin's most minute surveys were those of glacier-clothed Mustaghata 

 (Father of the Ice Mountains), "the loftiest mountain of the Pamirs, and 

 one of the loftiest mountains in the world, [which] towers up to the height 

 of 25,600 feet, and like a mighty bastion overlooks the barren wastes of cen- 

 tral Asia" (p. 217). More than once did he circumscribe it ; dwelling long 

 on its flanks and about its base at the height of world-famed mountains, 

 he learned the legends to which its majesty has given birth in the simple 

 minds of the natives, surveyed its glaciers, and studied their behavior at 

 different seasons, and strove repeatedly but vainly to reach the culminating 

 dome. The slopes are not inaccessible, but a barrier — half deified by the 

 Kirghiz as the Soroche of the Andes is deified by the Peruvians — exists 

 in the rarity and chill of the air; horses lose their powers little above the 

 plateau level, and men yield to the strain of climbing ere halfway up the 

 slopes ; the big-lunged and phlegmatic yak might indeed be forced within 

 climbing distance of the crest, but Hedin found that he and his Kirghiz 

 were incapacitated by camping at the 20,000-foot level. So the icy crest, 

 standing guard over bleak Pamir and sun-parched Takla-makan, and 

 looking down on all but the lightest of clouds, remains unhonored by 

 human tread. Of no less geographic interest were the more gen- 



eral surveys in the desert of Gobi (Takla-makan) and the studies of long- 

 mysterious Lob-nor — the shifting lake in which the waters gathering 

 from the eastern Pamir and northern Thibet are lost through evaporation 

 and absorption. The desert work involved several trips, including an 

 ill-starred (and ill-started) journey in which two men, half a dozen camels 

 and some other livestock, as well as much of the instrumental outfit, 

 were sacrificed, the author and his Asian mentor, Islam Bai, escaping with 

 their lives through a succession of accidents with which ordinary fore- 

 sight had little to do. Partly because of its stress, even this desert ex- 

 perience is a contribution to knowledge ; probably no better record of the 

 effects of hunger and thirst on men and animals has been written — though 

 the trip was made with a thermometric range from about 90° downward 

 (i. e., at a temperature considerably lower than that of the blood), so that 

 the march of physiologic events by no means kept pace with that ob- 

 served in our own Death valley and Mojave desert and Papagueria, where 

 the midday thermometer reaches 130° in the shade and 160° in the sun, 

 or far above normal blood-heat. The later desert trips were productive 



