224 
THROUGH ASIA 
leave of Togdasin Beg, the caravan put itself into motion, 
and slowly began the ascent, in a south-south-east direction. 
The yak is guided by means of a cord drawn through the 
cartilage of the nose. All the same the animal goes pretty 
much his own way, no matter how strongly his rider may 
protest. It is his wont to march doggedly on, with his 
muzzle close to the ground, breathing so hard that you 
can almost imagine your ears are buzzing with the sharp 
drone of a steam-saw tearing its way through timber some 
distance away. 
At a place called Kamper-kishlak, or “Old Woman 
Village,” we passed a glacier, with light green ice in its 
crevasses, and a gigantic boulder of gneiss, split in two, 
immediately underneath its terminal moraine. According 
to tradition, the place derives its name from the fact that 
once, when the Shah of Shugnan waged war against the 
Kirghiz, the latter all fled, with the exception of one old 
woman, and she hid herself between the two halves of the 
huge piece of rock. 
The ascent was very steep, and nowhere afforded firm 
footing, the slopes being thickly strewn with gneiss blocks 
of every conceivable size and shape. The mountain is 
indeed built up almost exclusively of gneiss and crystalline 
slates ; although in the mounds of detritus higher up I 
picked out fragments of black porphyry and micaceous 
schists, the latter showing signs of having been subjected 
to great pressure. I also found the last-mentioned rock 
in solid masses at the altitude of 16,500 feet. 
Coming towards evening to a place that was free from 
snow, as well as sheltered from the wind, we halted there 
at an’ altitude of 14,560 feet, and pitched our simple camp. 
It consisted merely of a few felt carpets, supported by the 
alpenstocks and tied with a rope. Then one of the sheep 
was slaughtered, whilst the Kirghiz prayed “ Allahu akhbar 
bismillah errahi man errahim” — “God is great. In the name 
of God the Merciful, the Righteous ! ” and before the fiesh 
was cold it was plunged into the melted snow which filled 
the cooking-pot. The fuel with which our fire was made 
was nothing better than yak-dung. But later on m the 
