560 
THROUGH ASIA 
At noon I proposed moistening' each man’s lips, and in the 
evening intended to divide what was left into five equal 
portions. I wondered how many days we should hold out 
after that. Mohammed Shah said, that once in Tibet, 
many years before, he had struggled on for thirteen days 
without water. 
Again the funereal bells began their mournful ding-dong, 
ding-dong ; the caravan got into motion for the east. At 
first the dunes were only twenty-five feet high; but we had 
not advanced far, before we were once more struggling 
through the mazes of chong-kum (big sand). A little 
wagtail circled round the caravan, twittering, and once 
more caused our rapidly expiring hopes to flicker up. 
Islam Bai was so encouraged by the incident, that he 
proposed to go on in advance with the iron pitchers and 
fetch water for us all. But I said “ No.” I needed him 
now more than ever ; and we went on all together. 
From the very start almost Yollchi was missing. The 
other men believed that he was unable to keep up with us 
any longer, but would die on our track. They were all 
embittered against the man. At the last lake we passed 
he swore, that we only needed to carry water sufficient 
for four days, and undertook within that space to bring 
us to a region where we could get water by digging for 
it. But the men believed that, from the very beginning, 
he had entertained a treacherous design against us, that 
he had of deliberate purpose led us into a part of the 
desert where we must inevitably perish of thirst, that 
he had stolen some of the w'ater for his own secret use 
whilst he hastened, after the wreck of our caravan, to 
inhabited parts to fetch .some other “gold seekers” of 
the same stamp as himself to come and plunder my goods. 
It was not easy to determine how much of truth there 
was in this theory ; and the matter was never cleared up. 
Every evening up to this point I had kept a fully 
detailed account of each day’s incidents in my journal ; 
and those accounts constitute the foundation of my de- 
scription of that awful journey. The last lines I wrote 
in my book, which might have been the last I ever 
