This little town is nearly 11,500 feet above sea-level. It contains an open bazaar street, and a mound above the town is crowned by the old royal castle. Leh, as well as the whole of the district of Ladak, is subject to the Maharaja of Kashmir, but the people are mostly of Tibetan race and their religion is Lamaism. FOOTNOTES: [10] A "satrap" was originally a governor of a province in ancient Persia. VII EASTERN TURKESTAN (1895) THE TAKLA-MAKAN DESERT We are now on the high road between India and Eastern Turkestan, the most elevated caravan route in the world. Innumerable skeletons of transport animals lie there, marking where the road passes through snow. After a month's journey over the cold, lofty mountains we come to the town of Yarkand, in the spacious, flat, bowl-shaped hollow, surrounded on all sides except the east by mountains, which is called Eastern Turkestan. To the south stand the immense highlands of Tibet, where the great rivers of India and China take their rise. On the west is the Pamir, the "Roof of the World," where the two great rivers of the Sea of Aral begin their course. On the north lie the Tien-shan, or Mountains of Heaven, which are continued farther north-eastwards by the Altai and several other mountain systems, among which the gigantic rivers of Siberia have their origin. Within this ring of mountains, at the very heart of the great continent of Asia, lies this lowland of Eastern Turkestan, like a Tibetan sheepfold enclosed by enormous walls of rock. In its northern part a river called the Tarim flows from west to east. It is formed by the Yarkand-darya and the Khotan-darya on the south, and receives other affluents along its course, for water streams down from the snowfields and glaciers of the wreath of mountains enclosing Eastern Turkestan. The head-waters of the Tarim leap merrily down through narrow valleys among the mountains, but the great river is doomed never to reach the sea. It terminates and is lost in a desert lake named Lop-nor. Trees grow along this river, mostly small, stunted poplars, but the wooded belts along the banks are very narrow; soon the trees thin out and come to an end, steppe shrubs and tamarisks take their place, and only a mile or two from the river there is nothing but deep sand without a sign of vegetation. The greater part of Eastern Turkestan is occupied by the desert called Takla-makan, the most terrible and dangerous in the world. [Illustration: MAP OF EASTERN TURKESTAN, SHOWING JOURNEYS DESCRIBED ON pp. 89-110.] A belt of desert runs through the whole of Asia and Africa, like a dried-up river bed. This belt includes the Gobi, which extends over most of Mongolia, the Takla-makan, the "Red Sand" and the "Black Sand" in Russian Turkestan, the Kevir and other deserts in Persia, the deserts of Arabia, and lastly the Sahara. In this succession of deserts extending over the Old World from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic the Takla-makan is, then, a link.