Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/419

Rh hardships. On one side looms up the desert, with its sand-storms, its dearth of water, its heat and cold; on another side, the European encounters a suspicious, barbarous people, who will meet him in ambush or be his open enemies. After three years of contention with these difficulties, he had the rare fortune of reaching the Kuku-Nor and the upper waters of the Yang-tse-Kiang River in Thibet. He had only to lament the insufficiency of his outfit, a matter of great importance in all explorations. Yet, with the means he had, he carried the line of his journey thirty-three hundred miles forward with the aid of a hand-compass, defined eighteen meridians on his map, and observed the magnetic variation at nine points and the horizontal deviation at seven. Meteorological observations were taken four times a day, the temperature of the ground was tested frequently, and hygrometric observations were taken several times. Special attention was given to physiographical investigations and the examination of the mammals and birds, and every opportunity for ethnographical research was improved. The expedition collected specimens of two hundred and thirty-eight species of birds, skins of forty-two species of mammals, a dozen amphibia, eleven species of fishes, and more than three thousand insects. These were all deposited in the Museum of the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. The botanical collections, which were handed over to the Imperial Botanical Gardens, included some four thousand examples, of five or six hundred species. The mineralogical collection comprised small specimens from all the ranges that were crossed.

The route of this expedition was from Kiakhta to Peking, where the outfit was completed, thence along the southeastern border of the Mongolian table-land north of Peking to the city of Dolon-Nor, across the Dulai-Nor Lake to Kalgan and the Yellow River, and thence over an Alpine region and across the Hoang-ho to Ordos in its valley. From this place it went to the marshy Zaidemin Lake, and thence to the Ala-Shan, or the southwestern part of the Desert of Gobi, a barren region, inhabited by a Mongolian tribe, the Oleuts, and to the Ala-Shan Mountains, a range in places exceeding ten thousand feet in height, and which is the home of the musk-ox. High as these mountains are, they possess an abundant animal life. Unfortunately, the explorer's funds were exhausted at this point, and his pass from the Chinese Government extending only to the province of Shan-Su, there seemed to be no alternative but to retire to Kalgan in Southeastern Mongolia. The expedition returned along the left shore of the Yellow River, through the country of the Urotes, visiting on the way the great salt lake Jaratai Dabaru, whence salt is carried to China. The return was beset with many difficulties, but Kalgan was reached at last, and the first part of the expedition was completed, with results on the whole so satisfactory that the travelers, though still in the interior of Asia, determined to undertake a journey to the