Page:From Kulja, across the Tian Shan to Lob-Nor (1879).djvu/79

60 from every bough that you brush aside from your path. Now, again, you come to acres of dead poplars, with broken boughs, shorn of their bark, lifeless trunks never decaying, but crumbling away by degrees, to be hidden in layers of sand.

But cheerless as these woods are, the neighbouring desert is even more dreary. Nothing can exceed the monotony of the scenery. Whichever way you turn, an ill-favoured plain meets your eye, covered with what seem to be large mounds, but which are really hillocks of clay surmounted by tamarisk, between which the path winds, every surrounding object shut out from sight, and even the distant hills barely visible in blue outline through the dusty vapour which fills the atmosphere like fog. Not a bird, not an animal, nothing but the occasional tracks of the timid gazelle.