Page:From Kulja, across the Tian Shan to Lob-Nor (1879).djvu/124

Rh Uitun, five; Shakel, four; Kara-Kurchin, two villages with four houses in each; besides these, nine families are settled at Chargalyk. The Kara-Kurchintsi therefore number some seventy families, with a population of 300 souls of both sexes.

The increase of population at Lob-nor is very trifling, the reason of course being the unfavourable conditions of life there. Five or six children in a family are rare, the usual number being two or three, and sometimes there are none at all.

In earlier but not very remote times Lob-nor was far more numerously populated than it is now; it numbered then some 550 families, two-thirds of whom lived on the lake itself, but twenty years ago the small-pox destroyed in the course of a few months nearly all the inhabitants, and most of those who survived had been attacked by the disease. However, even these insignificant remnants of the former people of Lob-nor were only preserved in their primitive state within the lake itself. The other inhabitants had already commenced an altered mode of life; they kept flocks of sheep, and bred homed cattle in small numbers, sowed corn and made bread of it. This change for the better, at all events in agriculture, began not very long ago under the influence of the Khoten immigrants living at Chargalyk, and it is in the neighbourhood of this village that the native population sow their wheat