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Updated: June 10, 2025
He followed a more southerly route than Carpini, skirting the northern shores of the Black Sea, the Caspian, and the Sea of Aral, and then passing northward to Karakorum. Returning he crossed the Caucasus and passed through Persia and the lands of the Turks, finally reaching the Mediterranean through Syria.
It embraces, as his map shows, Egypt as far south as Victoria Nyanza, Arabia, Persia, the greater part of India, the littoral of the Black Sea, the plains of the Volga, the circuit of the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea, and in the north-east nearly touches Tomsk.
Nor should it be overlooked that this rich country has been subjected to the same calamities which have been the desolation of Asia Minor; for, as the Turcomans have devastated the latter, so, as I have already had occasion to mention, Zingis swept round the sea of Aral, and destroyed the fruits of a long civilization.
But no such system has hitherto been applied to the Sir, and it is doubtful whether success would attend it. The Sir, where it falls into the Sea of Aral, is very shallow, seldom even in the flood season exceeding four feet.
Chalk occurs in north-west Ireland; it stretches over a large part of France, the chalk which underlies Paris being, in fact, a continuation of that of the London basin; it runs through Denmark and Central Europe, and extends southward to North Africa; while eastward, it appears in the Crimea and in Syria, and may be traced as far as the shores of the Sea of Aral, in Central Asia.
In 1852 the inevitable military expedition was followed by the customary permanent post. Between Perovsky and Vernoye there were upwards of four hundred and fifty miles of desert open to the incursions of brigands, and between the Aral and Caspian seas there was a gap, two hundred miles in width, favorable for raids into the Orenburg Steppe from the side of Khiva.
To account for such a phenomenon, a great inland sea, bearing some resemblance to the Caspian or the Aral, appears to be necessary.
Therefore, the supposition of a free inflow of the Arctic Ocean, which at one time was generally received, as well as that of various hypothetical deluges from that quarter, must be seriously questioned. The Caspian and the Aral stand in somewhat the same relation to the vast basin of dry land in which they lie, as the Dead Sea and the lake of Galilee to the Jordan valley.
To the south stand the immense highlands of Tibet, where the great rivers of India and China take their rise. On the west is the Pamir, the "Roof of the World," where the two great rivers of the Sea of Aral begin their course.
For twenty days he had travelled by caravan across the Persian uplands, through Herat, and Meshed and Bokhara, striking off with his guide alone toward the Sea of Aral and the eastern shores of the Caspian, thence through the Ural foothills to the old Roman highway that led down into the sweet green valleys of a land he had thought of as nothing more than the creation of a hairbrained fictionist.
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