298 
THROUGH ASIA 
“It was not till the afternoon that the w’eather permitted 
a short topographical excursion in the neighbourhood ; 
even then we were overtaken by sharp showers of rain, 
and heard the thunder rumbling among the clefts of 
Mus-tagh-ata. We wandered through a typical moraine 
landscape, where wide tracts were strewn with mounds 
of grit and boulders of all sizes ; nearly all the latter being 
of different kinds of gneiss and schist, chiefly crystalline 
mica-schist. 
“These collections of gravel and grit sometimes formed 
continuous ridges, sometimes isolated cones. Not seldom 
they formed cii'gues, fifty to two hundred yards in diam- 
eter, with a rampart round, the last sometimes completely 
closed, sometimes with a single opening. Some of these 
cirqiies had a cone, others a cavity, in the middle. 
“Several boulders were very highly polished, or striated ; 
and everything tended to show that we were in a tract 
from which a glacier had once receded. One of these 
boulders particularly attracted my attention and was 
chosen as a topographical fixed-point on account of its 
dominant position. Its surface, two yards long and one 
broad, was smooth and polished, and on it was roughly 
but characteristically depicted six tekkes (wild goats). The 
brown gneiss rock had been scratched away with a sharp 
stone or perhaps an iron tool, and the design stood out in 
relief in dull grey. The Kirghiz could tell me nothing 
about the picture, except that they thought it was very old. 
“We discovered that the north end of the enormous 
moraine fell sheer down to a river, which was almost 
entirely fed by the melting of the glaciers and snowfields. 
The stream was called the Ike-bel-su (the River from the 
Two Passes) and flowed through the Sarik-kol valley, 
then broke through the Mus-tagh chain, and under the 
name of the Ghez-daria (as I have already mentioned in 
a previous chapter) reached the plains near Kashgar. 
“ F'rom the summit of the moraine we had a splendid 
view over the upper reaches of the river, rolling down its 
current as if issuing from a rocky portal between the lofty 
snow-covered mountains. On through the valley It wound. 
