HKB
we see, gives a different account; Wood was there in the winter, but heard that in summer the lake swarmed with water-fowl. [Cf. Captain Trotter, p. 263, in Forsyth’s Mission.]
The Pamir Steppe was crossed by Benedict Goës late in the autumn of 1603, and the narrative speaks of the great cold and desolation, and the difficulty of breathing. We have also an abstract of the journey of Abdul Mejid, a British Agent, who passed Pamir on his way to Kokan in 1861:—“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 Wakhán 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 Táshkurgán, 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. Géog. XI. 1890, p. 587), who accepts Trotter’s route, by the Pamir Khurd (Little Pamir), says there are three routes from Wakhán 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