CHAPTER LV. 
FESTIVITIES ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD 
VERY evening at eight o’clock the Cossacks had 
J j religious service. Then there echoed through the 
thin mountain -air the moving melodies of the solemn 
malitva (chant) and the Russian national hymn. Huge 
fires blazed all round the camp, both close in and at a 
distance, for the various Asiatic races to cook their 
suppers at ; but all fires were extinguished long before 
the lights were out in the officers’ quarters. The moon 
gleamed out at intervals between the rapidly scudding 
clouds, and lit up the broad, open valley of the Ak-su. 
A chain of mountains, the Emperor Nicholas IP’s Range, 
the highest summit of which is Salisbury Peak, shut in the 
valley on the north ; another range, the Mus-tagh chain, 
bordered it on the south. The effect was enchanting in 
the extreme when a cloud came between the moon and the 
camp, so that the tents were in the shade, whilst the eternal 
snowfields of the distant mountains glittered as though 
silvered over. 
d hese desolate plateaus, uninhabited save by a few half- 
civilized nomad Kirghiz, had never witnessed such a 
gathering as that which I have just described, and are 
hardly likely to witness anything similar to it again. I 
imagined the shy tekkes (wild goats) and wild sheep {Ovis 
Poli) gazing in stupefied amazement from their lofty 
pasture - grounds beside the glaciers over the bustling 
scenes below, rudely violating the century -long peace 
and tranquillity of the Ak-su valley. Where the frontier- 
line between the possessions of England and the pos- 
sessions of Russia should fall was to them a matter of 
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