- "Fourteen Weary Days Were Occupied In Crossing The Steppe; The
Marches Were Long, Depending On Uncertain Supplies Of Grass And
Water,
which sometimes wholly failed them; food for man and beast had to be
carried with the party, for not
A trace of human habitation is to be met
with in those inhospitable wilds.... The steppe is interspersed with
tamarisk jungle and the wild willow, and in the summer with tracts of high
grass." (Neumann, Pilgerfahrten Buddh. Priester, p. 50; V. et V. de H.
T. 271-272; Wood, 232; Proc. R. G. S. X. 150.)
There is nothing absolutely to decide whether Marco's route from Wakhan
lay by Wood's Lake "Sirikol," or Victoria, or by the more southerly source
of the Oxus in Pamir Kul. These routes would unite in the valley of
Tashkurgan, and his road thence to Kashgar was, I apprehend, nearly the
same as the Mirza's in 1868-1869, by the lofty Chichiklik Pass and Kin
Valley. But I cannot account for the forty days of wilderness. The Mirza
was but thirty-four days from Faizabad to Kashgar, and Faiz Bakhsh only
twenty-five.
[Severtsof (Bul. Soc. Geog. XI. 1890, p. 587), who accepts Trotter's
route, by the Pamir Khurd (Little Pamir), says there are three routes from
Wakhan to Little Pamir, going up the Sarhadd: one during the winter, by
the frozen river; the two others available during the spring and the
summer, up and down the snowy chain along the right bank of the Sarhadd,
until the valley widens out into a plain, where a swelling is hardly to be
seen, so flat is it; this chain is the dividing ridge between the Sarhadd
and the Aksu. From the summit, the traveller, looking towards the west,
sees at his feet the mountains he has crossed; to the east, the Pamir
Kul and the Aksu, the river flowing from it. The pasture grounds around
the Pamir Kul and the sources of the Sarhadd are magnificent; but lower
down, the Aksu valley is arid, dotted only with pasture grounds of
little extent, and few and far between. It is to this part of Pamir that
Marco Polo's description applies; more than any other part of this
ensemble of high valleys, this line of water parting, of the Sarhadd and
the Aksu, has the aspect of a Roof of the World (Bam-i-dunya, Persian
name of Pamir). - H. C.].
[We can trace Marco Polo's route from Wakhan, on comparing it with Captain
Younghusband's Itinerary from Kashgar, which he left on the 22nd July,
1891, for Little Pamir: Little Pamir at Bozai-Gumbaz, joins with the
Pamir-i-Wakhan at the Wakhijrui Pass, first explored by Colonel Lockhart's
mission. Hence the route lies by the old fort of Kurgan-i-Ujadbai at the
junction of the two branches of the Tagh-dum-bash Pamir (Supreme Head of
the Mountains), the Tagh-dum-bash Pamir, Tash Kurgan, Bulun Kul, the Gez
Defile and Kashgar. (Proc. R. G. S. XIV.
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