X 
THROUGH ASIA 
As a rule I laid down my maps on the scale i : 95,000. 
Across the level expanses of the deserts, however, I 
worked to the scale i : 200,000 ; and in mountainous 
regions, where the road wound through defiles, where 
numerous side-valleys joined the main valley, and wliere 
the morphological character of the surface underwent 
frequent and varying changes, I used the scale of 
1 ; 50,000. The aggregate distance of the route I mapped 
in this way amounts to 1049 Swedish miles, or 6520 
English miles ; that is to say, nearly four and a half 
times the distance from London to Constantinople, two 
and a half times the distance from New York to San 
Francisco, and one and a half times the distance from 
Cairo to Cape Town, in other words, more than one- 
quarter of the earth’s circumference. If to this be added 
more than 8000 miles which I travelled by carriage or rail 
in the better known portions of the continent, we get for the 
entire extent of my travels a grand total of 14,600 miles, 
or more than the distance from the North Pole to the 
South Pole. The rate of travel of my caravans, calculated 
from the results of the whole of the journey, averages 
a little over two and three-quarter miles an hour. 
Out of the above-mentioned 6520 miles no less than 
2020 were through regions which no European had ever 
before visited. Over certain portions of the remaining 
4500 miles one traveller had preceded me, over other 
portions two travellers, but in no case more than three. 
Despite that, my observations along even those stretches 
may claim to possess a certain degree of originality ; for 
being able to speak Jagatai Turki with fluency, I was 
independent of the errors and wilful deceits of interpreters, 
and consequently was In a position to gather a good deal 
of information of a more or less important character which 
will be new to most readers. For one thing, I was able 
to record a vast number of geographical names, none of 
