7o8 
THROUGH ASIA 
driving yaks on before them. If the pass is absolutely 
impassable, there is no other way of reaching Tash- 
kurgan except by going right round through Yarkand 
and Tagharma. 
The snow continued to fall in big feathery flakes all 
the evening, and drifted together in loose snowdrifts. 
The air was cold, moist, and raw, and the darkness a 
darkness that could almost be felt. Our Tajik neighbours 
made first-class wheat bread, and some of the young- girls 
came to my tent unveiled and offered me a few pieces. 
I accepted it, and rewarded them with some strips of cloth 
from Kashgar. 
September 20th. When we awoke in the morning it 
was still snowing, and it snowed right on till eleven 
o clock in the morning. T. he weight of the snow pressed 
so heavily upon my tent that the men frequently had to 
sweep It off, till I became literally encompassed by walls 
of snow. When we started again, we were joined by two 
young women, riding yaks. They were going a short 
distance down the glen to fetch fuel. They were un- 
commonly pretty and merry, and, their hair being black, 
and their eyebrows conspicuously marked, they put me in 
mind of gipsy lasses. They helped us with our caravan- 
animals, as though it were a perfectly natural thing to do ; 
and their silvery voices, as they cried to them and urged 
them on, echoed musically against the steep mountain- 
walls. Their clothes hung about them in scanty rags ; 
it made me shiver to see the thickly falling snow melting 
on their coppery brown bare necks and bosoms. 
A short distance below our camp the glen contracted 
into a defile, which, owing to the fallen stones and huge 
fragments of rock, and the torrents of clear cool water 
which brawled amongst them, made the road both narrow 
and difficult. We repeatedly crossed and re-crossed the 
stream, in many places not without imminent risk of a 
bath. But just as often the path skirted the edge of the 
conglomerate terraces, the clay matrix of which had 
become softened by the melting snow, so that the ground 
threatened to slip away from under our feet. 
