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96 ADVENTURES IN TIBET.
nothing—absolutely nothing whatever—to show that hfe
in any shape or form ever existed there. That evening we
missed the shelter of the reed thicket, for we were com-
pletely exposed to the whirling, choking drift-sand, which
swept across our little camp-fire in smothering clouds.
Islam and I, having already made one dangerous journey
across the Takla-makan, knew what was before us. The
desert here was twice as wide as where we crossed the Takla-
makan in 1895, when the whole caravan perished. The
question we put to ourselves every day, though we never
gave expression to it, was, would any of us issue alive from
this new attempt to cross the desert ?
It was very fortunate for us that the prevailing wind had
built up the drift-sand into dunes in a direction so regular
and so advantageous for our particular line of march. The
wind in question, which blows especially in the spring and
summer with unparalleled violence, though remarkable
regularity, comes from the east-north-east. It heaps up
the sand in waves, like the waves of the ocean, though un-
speakably higher ; in fact, they sometimes attain altitudes
of 300 feet or more, or only 50 or 60 feet short of the top
of the dome of St. Paul’s. These mountains of sand stretch
in endless lines from north-east to south-west, but in the
troughs or valleys between them the ground is level and
bare. Another system of dunes, though considerably
lower, intersects the former system at right angles, thus
making a gigantic network of sand-dunes. The meshes,
or hollow spaces between the dunes, are in reality depres-
sions, which the natives call hayirs. By following these
depressions south-west, and crossing the sandy passes
which separate them at each end, we were able to avoid
the lofty swellings of sand which accompanied us on both
sides. As an actual fact we travelled in all nearly 90 miles
on the level ground of these hayirs, but the rest of the
journey was on the sand, which, especially in the southern
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