54 ° 
THROUGH ASIA 
How long had the bones lain there? To these questions 
the obdurate desert sand returned no answer. For my 
part, I fail to see why those bones may not have lain 
where we found them for thousands of years. I ascer- 
tained subsequently from several instances, that the dry, 
fine desert sand unquestionably does possess the property 
of preserving organic matter for a very long period of 
time. Perhaps the skeleton had lain buried beneath the 
sand for centuries, and had only quite recently been ex- 
posed through the drifting away of the superincumbent 
dunes. 
We were all completely done up through weariness and 
the cravings of thirst. We were unable to drag ourselves 
on more than another mile and a half, and then halted on 
a patch of hard, level clay. There too we lighted upon 
a number of curious objects, namely small, brittle, white 
snail-shells, tiny pebbles, which some time or other had 
been rolled and polished by water, amorphous pieces of 
flint, a fragment of a mussel-shell, and a large quantity of 
pipe-like formations of limestone, as though lime had been 
moulded round the stalks of reeds. 
It was evening when Yollchi and Mohammed Shah 
struggled into camp, tired and thirsty, supporting their 
steps on their hand-staves. They came alone. The two 
camels refused to go any further, and so they had left 
them to their fate. As soon as it turned a little cooler 
I sent a man to fetch them. He found that they had 
picked up a bit, and towards midnight brought them in. 
Our spirits all revived that evening. Looking to the 
east with my field-glass, I thought the dunes were much 
lower, 40 to 50 feet at the most. To-morrow we should 
be through the high sand-ridges, we should perhaps be 
able to encamp in the woods of the Khotan-daria ! A 
glorious thought! It put life into us all. 
From this point I did without the tent. It was necessary 
to husband our strength for more essential exertions. We 
all slept comrade-like under the open sky. Yollchi how- 
ever held aloof from us, and never spoke unless he was 
spoken to first. There was a traitorous look in his eye ; 
