75 ° 
THROUGH ASIA 
of fare — rice, mutton, and bread. They were something 
very different from the appallingly high ducks and ham 
steeped in molasses, to which our friend the Dao Tai 
of Kashgar treated us, no doubt with the very thrifty 
idea that, “as they never eat anything, it doesn’t much 
matter what we put before them.” But at Liu Darin’s 
I ate like a Chinaman, and felt well after it ; w'hich is 
more than I can say of the Dao Tai’s dinners. 
Of the present Ilchi there is not much to be said. It is 
a place of no interest, a mere labyrinth of poor, insignifi- 
cant houses, with narrow streets and alleys between them, 
such as I had seen in Yarkand. There were seven mad- 
rasas (theological colleges), twenty mosques, and a number 
of masars (saints’ tombs) belonging to the orthodox 
Mohammedans. Of the masars, the chief w'as the Altyn 
Busrugvar masar. There are saints’ tombs of the same 
name in Yarkand, Ak-su, and Turfan. All are said to 
have been erected to the memory of the .sons of Khoja 
Isaki Vali, whose own tomb is at Chira, and one of the 
most venerated in the country. Pilgrims always go there 
before visiting Imam Jafer Sadik’s tomb, in the sandy 
desert near where the Niya-daria loses itself in the sand. 
The Mesjid-i-Jami or principal mosque had a really beauti- 
ful colonnade, and the Hazrett-i-Sultan, like most of the 
religious monuments thereabouts, was built by the great 
Yakub Beg. 
As in all Mohammedan towns, the bazaar was the centre 
and main artery of the life of the place. Off its streets 
branched a number of incredibly narrow, crooked, dirty 
lanes ; but at intervals there were open squares, with tanks 
or ponds shaded by trees. In the middle of the town, close 
by the bazaar, there was a so-called kovneh-sefit-potai (old 
clay pyramid), with ruined tower and walls, a surviving 
relic of Haji Padshah’s orcbt, or castle. This point over- 
looked the town, giving a good bird’s-eye view of its square 
roofs and courtyards, as well as of the fields outside the 
walls. As they were at that season under water, and were 
separated from one another by ramparts of earth, they 
looked like the brightly polished squares of a chess-board. 
