8io 
THROUGH ASIA 
at Khotan ; and I thought to myself, that were I a 
shepherd and married, I should take good care to have 
my wife with me out there in the woods. But the 
Khotan-daria is, we learned, a thoroughfare, though not 
a very frequented one, which the Chinese sometimes use, 
and the shepherds were afraid of the licence with which 
the Chinese sometimes treat the native women. 
It is otherwise beside the Keriya-daria. There there was 
no road, and the shepherds had their families with them. 
Hussein and his better half who was childless, in their lone- 
liness reminded me somewhat of Adam and Eve, except 
that they were clothed from head to foot in sheepskins. 
With regard to the river, Hussein told me, that shortly 
above Keriya it is distributed through numerous ariks 
(irrigation-canals) to the fields in the district, so that 
the river almost disappears. It is no doubt partly for 
this reason that none of the travellers who have been to 
Keriya — Przhevalsky, Pievtsoff, Grombtchevsky, Dutreuil 
de Rhins, Littledale — have thought it worth while to 
explore the river. With the exception of Pievtsoff, they 
have all delineated its course on their maps far too short. 
Below the town were many copious wells, formed by 
the overflow from the ariks. These again serve to feed 
the river anew. For this reason the natives say, that 
the river gets larger the farther it goes, although it 
might be expected that the reverse would be the case ; 
but the assertion is of course only partially correct. In 
June and July, when the ice and snow melt on the 
mountains of Tibet, the flood comes down and fills the 
river to the brink ; but it is never so swollen but that 
it can be forded in several places. The flood which 
goes past the irrigation-canals is called ak-su, or “ white 
water,” because it comes from the melting snows ; in 
contradistinction to kara-su or “ black water,” which 
comes from natural springs. The water sinks rapidly 
in the autumn, and by the end of November freezes in 
large detached sheets, which become piled up one above 
the other, so that the river looks larger than it really is. 
At the time of our visit, the river was in this, its 
