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NARRATIVE. 
animals, and insisted on putting the loads on tlieir 
own yaks. These were the finest animals of the kind 
I had yet seen. They were not unlike the shaggy,long- 
horned cattle of the Scotch Highlands, but were much 
more strongly built. They have, as a rule, enormous 
horns, which, as Mr. Bly th has pointed out to me, have 
a difierent curve from those of the wild yak, but which 
in other respects they exactly resemble. I never re- 
marked the difference in the horns myself, and do not 
know if it actually exists in all cases. A very few 
want horns entirely. The usual colour is black, but 
some are white or light brown. The hair is so long, 
particularly on the hind-quarters, that it almost 
touches the ground. The wild yak is almost always 
found, I believe, just under the snow line, and the tame 
yak is seldom employed below 12,000 feet. Yaks are 
wonderfully sure-footed, and will carry one safely over 
the most rugged and diflBcult ground. They are 
very good at fording streams, for, in addition to being 
very sure-footed, they swim well, and even if carried 
ofi* their legs by the stream, they recover themselves 
the moment their feet again touch the rocks. 
We passed to-day an extensive jade mine which 
until a few years ago was worked by the Chinese, * 
but is now given up. All the ground in the neigh- 
bourhood is strewn with fragments of jade, and 
everything inside the mine is precisely in the same 
state as when the Chinese abandoned it. Dr. Cayley, 
who carefully inspected this mine, has given a very 
interesting account of it in " Macmillan's Magazine" 
for October, 1871. On arrival at Balakchi, we found 
that Mirza Shadi had pitched one of his tents for 
us at some distance from his own camp, and shortly 
