118 NARRATIVE. 
indigestion, or cataract. I saw one well-marked case 
of leprosy in a boy of ten years of age, and a case of 
elephantiasis of the leg in a boy of twelve years. 
We had now arrived within three marches of Yar- 
kand city — namely, to Posgam twenty miles, Yangi 
Bazar fifteen miles, Yarkand eight miles. These three 
marches were by far the most interesting part of our 
journey, for we were now out of the desert, and rode 
through cultivation and villages the whole way. 
Unfortunately, I was usually obliged to yield to the 
custom of the country and ride with the cavalcade, 
and could not go about shooting or collecting plants, 
except at the halting places. 
The whole country here is intersected by canals ; and 
at the points where these were crossed by roads, sub- 
stantial wooden bridges had been constructed. We 
had to ford several streams near Kargallik, one of 
which was about four feet deep. 
We met numbers of villagers going to the fairs, 
most of them mounted on donkeys, and passed nume- 
rous fields of cotton, the plants loaded with pods of very 
long fine fibre; but the plants themselves were very 
stunted, being only about eighteen inches high. As a 
rule, the banks of the canals are not kept free from 
weeds and long grass, and the result is that many of 
the fields contain fully more weeds than crop, and have 
a neglected look. This is by no means the rule, how- 
ever, and many of the fields of Indian corn were as 
fine as any I have ever seen. Eeligious mendicants, 
generally in parties of three, were seen at every turn ; 
they are distinguished by wearing tall wide-awake hats, 
about the size and shape of an ordinary sugar loaf 
Whenever we approached them they salaamed, 
