WOMEN OF THE PAMIRS.
camels to trample out a path in the snow. In one part of our track the snow was ten feet deep over an extent of 200 yards. We crossed this by laying tent-felts, which we borrowed from the Kirghises, over the snow. In six days we reached the Kizil-Art pass, in the Trans-Alai range, and crossed it safely. It is 14,620 feet high. In the valley on the other side the cold was very great. It reached thirty-eight and one-half degrees Celsius [equal to about thirty-eight degrees below zero, Fahrenheit], which is near the freezing point of mercury. But I am indifferent to cold. I am a Swede. It is often very cold in Stockholm. From Kizil-Art I traveled to the great salt lake of Karakul. I wanted to measure its depth, which nobody had yet done. I believed it to be very deep. I was entirely successful, for the lake was frozen over and we were able to move over the surface, so that I could select such places as I wanted for my sounding experiments. The deepest place I found was about 900 feet.
"Here I lost the caravan, and with one attendant spent a night on the ice, with nothing to eat or drink, tramping up and down in a temperature of fifteen degrees below zero. Then on to Murgab, where I spent twenty days with the Russian garrison; then to Lake Rang-kul, which I also sounded. Crossing the Djugatai pass, in the Sarik-Kol range, I entered Chinese territory.
"The Chinese were very much afraid of me. They thought I was a Russian conqueror, and were sure that all my boxes were full of soldiers. During my first night on Chinese territory, Chinese soldiers kept peeping into my tent to make sure that I was not opening my boxes and letting my soldiers out. The Chinese commander at Bulun-kul was very unpleasant. He was an enemy to Europe. Many Chinese detest Europeans. He gave orders that no one was to trade with me or give me fodder for my horses. At last, however, I persuaded him to give me permission to proceed south to Mus-tag-ata Mountain. I wanted to climb it. It is 25,000 feet high. During that year I made three different attempts to get to the top, but the highest point I reached was 20,000 feet. On each occasion the snow drove us back. On that first occasion I was attacked with violent iritis and had to make my way back to Kashgar. There I got well again, and wrote a book in German on the climate of the Pamirs. In June I returned to Mus-tag-ata, and spent the whole summer in camp there, studying the glaciers.
