extremity of the Inshan mountains on the northern bank of the Hoang-ho. Thence they descended to Bautu, on the left bank of the river, and crossed into the dreary plains of the Ordos.
Their course lay now for nearly 300 miles westward, and parallel to the southern bank of the river, where it forms that great northern bend, familiar to all who have been in the habit of consulting maps of China. In all our maps the river is here represented as forming a variety of branches, but the main stream as constituting the most northerly of these. This bed still remains, but the river now flows in the most southerly of the channels, some thirty or forty miles farther south than it did in former times.
At the town of Ding-hu (called on former maps by the Mongol name Chaghan-subar-khan), the travellers crossed to the left bank of the Yellow River, and here they were in the province of Ala-shan, of which we have from Prejevalsky for the first time some distinct account. It forms a part of
Tibet". This assertion somewhat surprised me, and led to a cross-examination, by means of which I elicited, among other matters relating to his excursion, the following:—He had passed the Great Wall at Kalgan, and had ridden a seven or eight days' journey towards the west, when he arrived in a mountainous country, where there were yaks. He had "read in books" that yaks were found in Tibet. The natives called the country Tibet, and so did his Chinese coxswain, who accompanied him. The people were "something like the Mongols," but spoke differently. Thinking he was mixing up his reading and experience for my special benefit and instruction, I left him, and thought no more of his story until some two months afterwards, at Kwei-hwa-cheng, I remarked that the Chinese pronounced the name of the Mongol tribe in that district Tümet or Timet, instead of Toumet, and the truth of G's story at once flashed across my mind . . . and that he saw yaks there I have not the slightest doubt, for I have seen them in the same neighbourhood . . . . though of course not indigenous, as he apparently supposed.
'Having read of Tibet, and never having either read or heard of the Toumet Mongols, he easily picked up the Chinese pronunciation of the latter, and confusing the m and the b, told a story that would have earned for a preaching friar of the fourteenth century some very hard names.'—Letter dated Sept. 29, 1873.)"
