DESERT. 
81 
a march of fifteen miles to Tarl Dat, but to our dismay 
found that twenty-five of our best horses, which had 
been placed in charge of a Ladiik official, were missing, 
and we had good reason to believe that they had been 
intentionally concealed. They were afterwards found 
in a ravine at some distance. I should mention that 
all our ponies were invariably turned loose on arriving 
in camp, and at once scampered off in search of grass. 
They seemed to feel the cold at night very much, and 
often tried to come inside our tents. Several times I 
have been awakened by finding some dark object in my 
tent, which turned out to be one of the horses that 
had managed to get all but his hind quarters into 
the tent. Towards morning they seemed to try to 
keep themselves warm by racing backwards and 
forwards amongst the tents. At Lak Zung the 
thermometer, placed out in the open, fell at night to 
7° F. After some delay in searching for the missing 
horses we at last started. A low pass being crossed, our 
road continued through a broad winding valley, with 
rounded hills on either side, the limestone rocks here 
and there projecting along the highest ridges. Se- 
dums and Artemisias in flower were common wherever 
a little moisture existed, and I saw hundreds of white 
and blue butterflies. Here I noticed a very remark- 
able appearance, about which I shall have more to say 
afterwards. For miles the surface of the ground was 
indented with circular pits, from six to eight feet in 
diameter and about three feet deep, the centre of each 
pit being the deepest part. The intervals between 
the pits did not measure more than the diameter of 
the pits themselves. Usually these pits were ex- 
tremely uniform in size and regular in shape. The 
G 
