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Updated: June 23, 2025
Let us set out on a journey from Timbuktu, and let us go first eastwards to the singular Lake Chad, which is half filled with islands, is shallow and swampy, choked with reeds, rises and falls with the discharge of the great rivers which flow into it, and has a certain similarity to Lop-nor in Central Asia.
In the course of ages these strong spring storms have ploughed out channels and furrows in the clay, but otherwise the desert is as level as a frozen sea, the places where Lop-nor formerly spread out its water being marked only by pink mollusc shells. On the north the Lop desert is bounded by the easternmost chains of the Tien-shan, which the Chinese also call the "Dry Mountains."
And, far to the west, nearest to the wrist, you find two rivers with which you are already acquainted: the Indus, which flows southwards into the Arabian Sea, and the Tarim, which runs north and east and falls into Lop-nor. The Himalayas are the loftiest range on earth, and among their crests rise the highest peaks in the world.
Just at this spot the Tarim bends southwards, falling farther down into a very shallow lake called Lop-nor. The whole country here is so flat that with the naked eye no inequalities can be detected. Therefore the river often changes its bed, sometimes for short and sometimes for long distances.
Formerly the river did not bend southwards, but proceeded straight on eastwards, terminating in another lake also called Lop-nor, which lay in the northern part of the desert, and which is mentioned in old Chinese geographies. The peculiarity of Lop-nor is, then, that the lake moves about, and, in conjunction with the lower course of the Tarim, swings like a pendulum between north and south.
The Yarkand-darya would never reach the lake, Lop-nor, where it discharges its water, if it did not receive a considerable tributary on the way. This tributary is called the Ak-su, or "White Water," and it comes foaming down from the Tien-shan, the high mountains to the north. After the rivers have mingled their waters, the united main stream is called the Tarim.
In late autumn they fly southwards through Tibet, and in winter the lakes are quiet, with yellow reeds sticking up through the ice. The level region over which the Lop-nor has wandered for thousands of years from north to south is called the Lop desert. Its stillness is broken only from time to time by easterly storms which roll like thunder over the yellow clay ground.
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