A CURIOUS SHEPHERD RACE 809 
(sheepfold), according as the pasture holds out. For 
instance, our friend Hussein (and Hassan) had the run 
of thirty aghils situated within two day’s-journey of one 
another. The owner of his flock lived in Keriya ; and 
every spring and autumn came to shear the sheep and 
count them, as well as to bring maize-flour and other 
necessaries to the shepherds. Hussein himself only went 
to town every other year. From Kotchkar-aghil (the 
ram-fold), the point where we struck the river, Keriya 
was distant only four day’s-journey. Farther down the 
river there were shepherds who had only been to Keriya 
once in their lifetime ; nay, we actually met a man, thirty- 
five years old, who had never been there, and could not 
conceive what a town or bazaar was like. Most of them 
however do visit the town from time to time. 
The forests of the Keriya-daria below the town were 
inhabited by about a hundred and fifty people, constituting 
a community apart, cut off from all communication with 
the outer world, far from all roads, inaccessible to every 
authority, surrounded on all sides by the grim silence of 
the desert. 
The shepherds never see a human being, except their 
nearest neighbours, and the bais journeying to their aghils 
lower down the river. They are therefore half wild and 
excessively shy, born and bred as they are in the depths 
of the primeval forest. The only things they know any- 
thing about are the watching and keeping of their sheep, 
how to shear them, how to drive them to the pastures, 
how to cut down young trees and branches for them, 
milk them, and in due season separate the lambs from 
their mothers. They also make maize-bread, build their 
sattmas or reed huts, dig wells when the river gives out, 
or when they are at a distance from it, and other simp e 
occupations of the kind. The ketinen (a Sart spade with the 
blade fixed at right angles to the shaft) and the balta (axe) 
are their most important tools. In fact they always carry 
the latter on their backs, pushed through their girdles. 
It had surprised me to find that the shepherds of the 
Khotan-daria lived alone, leaving their wives and children 
II.-IO 
