Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 2 (1876).djvu/181

159 from the Northern or Kan-su mountains, with which it probably unites at its western extremity.

Just as these latter mountains divide its basin from the moist, hilly, wooded region of Kan-su, so does the southern range define the boundary between the fertile steppes surrounding the lake and the deserts of Tsaidam and Tibet. The northern slopes of this range have many points of resemblance to the Kan-su mountains, and are for the most part covered with shrubs and small underwood, while on the other side their character is completely Mongolian. Here the clay soil is in many parts quite bare, or dotted only with an occasional tree-juniper; the watercourses are dry; and no sign of rich grassland is visible. Here also the traveller must prepare to enter the desert, which lies on the south, and may be compared in sterility with the plains of Ala-shan. Nothing grows on its saline clay soil but such grasses as the dirisun, with budarhana, and karmyk; its animals, the kara-sulta and kolo-djoro, are such as only inhabit the wildest deserts. Here lies the salt basin of Djaratai-dabas, about twenty-six miles in circumference, presenting a layer of excellent salt, a foot thick in the middle, diminishing to an inch round the edges. The salt is transported hence to Tonkir, its excavation being superintended by a resident Mongol official.

The plain in which this basin lies is twenty miles