868 
THROUGH ASIA 
been visited by the following Europeans ; — Carey and 
Dalgleish, Prince Henry of Orleans and Bonvalot, 
Pievtsoff and his two officers, and the geologist Bog- 
danovitch, and lastly by Littledale and his wife. But 
all these travelled by precisely the same route as the 
great Russian exploi'er, and therefore none of them, with 
the exception of Pievtsoff, has been able to add anything 
material to the masterly and conscientious description of 
the region which Przhevalsky gave in his account of his 
first journey (1876-77) to (his) Lop-nor, and which he 
supplemented himself after his second journey thither in 
the spring of 1885. 
If therefore I was to be in a position to determine the 
controversy between Przhevalsky and Von Richthofen, as 
indeed I hoped to be able to do, I must above all things 
avoid travelling to the lake by the same route that my 
predecessors had trod, and instead of that must make it 
my special object to visit the spot in which the Chinese 
geographers placed their Lop-nor, and in which, according 
to Von Richthofen, it ought to be situated. 
Full of high spirits and hopes of success, I left the 
village of Tikkenlik on March 31st, and journeyed exactly 
due east. My companions were Islam Bai, Kerim Jan, 
and two men who had an intimate knowledge of the 
country, and who told me, even before we left Tikkenlik, 
that a considerable distance to the east there was a long 
chain of lakes. At the very outset of the expedition we 
discovered, that the Koncheh-daria emptied itself north of 
Tikkenlik into a marshy lake called Maltak-kdll. But on 
the other side of the lake it flowed out again, and added 
its waters to the waters of the two branches of the Tarim 
before mentioned, and known as Kok-ala. After the 
confluence the united stream, under the name of the 
Kunchekkish-Tarim (the Eastern River), flowed partly 
into the lake Chivillik-koll, and thence back again into the 
Tarim, and partly direct to the Tarim, which it reached 
at the ferry of Arghan (Przhevalsky’s Ayrilghan), after 
losing a large proportion of its current by evaporation 
on the way. 
