758 
THROUGH ASIA 
observation must of course always rank first. But if a 
traveller passes through a place in the summer, he can 
have no idea as to its snowfall in the winter, and if he 
happens to be there on a clear day, he cannot know 
without asking whether rain is frequent. I always asked 
the same questions in the same order, namely — the 
population of the place, its products, saints’ tombs, 
mosques, legends, whether spring or autumn sowing was 
customary, or both, whether the same ground was used 
twice in the same year for different kinds of cereals, or 
whether the ground produced only one crop in the season, 
or even in every second year ; about trade and inter- 
communication, roads, the distances to the desert and to 
the mountains, the origin and volume of the water in the 
rivers, the time when they usually froze and when the 
ice began to melt, the system of irrigation and the local 
regulations connected with it, the wells, prevailing winds, 
frequency of burans, rainfall, snowfall, etc. 
One question paved the way for another, and the whole 
thing took me from two to three hours ; after that every- 
thing was carefully written down. Wherever there were 
human beings to question, I never turned in before 
midnight, hours after my men were snoring soundly. 
The answer I got to a particular question was sometimes 
the cause of my entirely abandoning an already conceived 
plan. For instance, I should never have risked crossing 
the desert a second time, had I not received information 
which made a successful issue of the enterprise almost a 
dead certainty. But as I have already observed, space 
forbids my recapitulating more of the great mass of 
material I collected in this way. 
The nine days we spent in Khotan passed rapidly in 
work of this kind, and in preparations for my impending 
journey through the desert. 
