Next day our twenty-four mile march led us entirely through cultivation, along a broad highway bordered with willows, the rice fields stretching for many acres on either side. The River Tiznaf flowed clear over a stony bed, in pleasing contrast to the muddy streams we had encountered hitherto, and we were told that those drinking from it never suffered from goitre.
FERRY ON THE YARKAND RIVER.
Page 192.
In this part of the world it is customary for the villages to open their bazars on different days and to name them accordingly. At the Panjshamba, or Thursday market, every kind of article is offered for sale, because the bazars are all closed on Juma (Friday), the day on which the Faithful visit the mosques, and I was told that at Khotan the Chahar-shamba (Wednesday) bazar is held only for the sale of milk products.
We met crowds of people coming to the Posgam market. There were beggars galore, whole families of them, sometimes accompanied by big dogs; and tramping along to gain their livelihood were the religious mendicants, who were striking figures clad in rags of many colours, wearing sugar-loaf hats and carrying bowls and stout sticks, or sometimes gourds and rattles. They evidently aimed at the picturesque in their appearance, and their outward dirt was a sign of inward holiness and conferred on them the power to drive away demons and heal diseases. Farther on we came across musicians carrying tars, some having instruments resembling zithers and others drums and pipes, while parties of Chinese laden with gambling tables struck a sinister note. The crowd was largely composed of women of the peasant class mounted on ponies or donkeys and driving their cattle and sheep to market, some clasping fowls in their arms. Two or three wore a curious globular hat of cloth of silver, the like of which I saw only once at Kashgar, when I was told that it was the headgear of a bride. All the world seemed bound for Posgam, and as we passed through village after village on our way to Kargalik hardly any one was to be seen, and the little stalls under the vine-covered trellises that roofed in the bazars were shuttered up or bare, with the exception of the bread stalls. The boxes of flowers on the roofs gave touches of light and colour in the form of asters, balsams and marigolds, while here and there masses of golden maize were drying in the sun.
On this occasion the Hindus had provided for us a refection of chops and poached eggs, evidently considering this food more suitable for a Sahib than the usual fowls, and when we had coped with this I left my brother to enjoy the reception given by the Russian subjects, and, attended by Jafar Bai, rode on to our quarters, passing the Chinese Amban on his way to greet the British Consul-General. This dignitary, with a most impassive face, drove in an elaborately painted mapa, preceded by a youth carrying a huge magenta silk umbrella with a deep fringe, while his escort of soldiers, in quaint black uniforms, were carrying mediaeval-looking spears and halberds.
The house prepared for us stood in a little garden crammed with vegetables and with enormous specimens of the misshapen and velvety crimson coxcomb. An outside staircase led to a balcony that ran round a large upper room with heavily barred wooden windows, which was the ladies’ abode—a very depressing one to my mind, as it remained in perpetual twilight, and from it no glimpse could be obtained of the outside world, though its smells and noises were extremely obvious. But, as I slept on the balcony, it served me for a convenient dressing-room, as well as for a retreat when my brother held the usual receptions of British subjects and Chinese officials in the house below.
About this time all the horses seemed to become lame at once. The Badakshani chestnut and the grey both took to limping, and the nice little pony on which I rode astride cut its fetlock badly. Kalmuck, our last purchase, though sound, was an exasperatingly sluggish horse and consequently very fatiguing to ride. Jafar Bai, as usual, persisted that the lameness was due to my brother’s order to water the horses after they had been about an hour in camp, and was in no way convinced when it was proved that bad shoeing had lamed one animal, and when the others gradually recovered in spite of adherence to the English rules as to forage and watering.
We were now to have our first sight of the real desert, which lay between us and the Khotan Oasis. On the night before our march across it we rested in a tiny village on its very edge, some of the mud-built houses being half-buried by the sand and others having trenches dug round them to keep it off. An irrigation channel ran between willows, with patches of cultivation on either side. We put up as best we could in the courtyard of a serai, the building itself being too crowded with peasants to accommodate us. Owing to the reluctance which all Orientals feel to leaving a town, the drivers of the arabas, in spite of their being drawn by five horses apiece, arrived so late that our supper, eaten by the light of the moon, was extremely scanty.