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54 ADVENTURES IN TIBET.
saw a glimpse of them again. And I don’t wonder at
them. Simple children of nature that they are, what must
they have thought when they saw our floating monster
gliding noiselessly as a panther down the stream ? Some
evil spirit of the desert, no doubt, coming to disturb them
in their peaceful forest-haunts !
During the two following days the wind proved very
troublesome. A regular desert storm was in progress, for
the fine dust drifted in dense clouds across the river and
its forests.
The sun was only visible when directly above-head,
and then as a faintly-blurred, yellowish-red disk. The
air was full of dry, rustling leaves, and in some of the bends
of the ri^’er they had accumulated until they formed actual
sargasso seas. In the reaches in which the wind was
against us our progress was painfully slow ; but when
we turned, so that we had the wind behind us, our vessel
flew past the banks until the water foamed off her bow.
But the wind dropping on the 19th, we resumed our steady
drift, and continued far on into the night. The moon
glittered on the surface of the river, throwing up the
figures of the men in front of me in sharp-cut outline.
The woods on the bank were as if etched in ink, the moon’s
rays only piercing through the thickets at the rarest inter-
vals. Two or three times we ran aground on the sand-
banks, not very pleasant for those who had to jump into
the water and push us off again, for the night was cold.
However, they got some compensation at the fire we
kindled when we stopped ; and a grand fire it was, made
up of no less than four gigantic toghrak (spreading poplar)
trunks, crackling and blazing away at once.
Not far from the bank at that spot stands the burial-
place of a saint called Hazret-i-Akhtam Rezi Allahu
Anhu. The holy place was marked by a mosque, con-
structed of beams and dry timber, and by a number of
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