“Thus, too, the description we receive through the Chinese historiographer, Ma Tuan-lin, of the shortest route from China towards Kara-shahr, undoubtedly corresponding to the present track to Lop-nor, reads almost like a version from Marco’s book, though its compiler, a contemporary of the Venetian traveller, must have extracted it from some earlier source.  ’You see nothing in any direction but the sky and the sands, without the slightest trace of a road; and travellers find nothing to guide them but the bones of men and beasts and the droppings of camels.  During the passage of this wilderness you hear sounds, sometimes of singing, sometimes of wailing; and it has often happened that travellers going aside to see what these sounds might be have strayed from their course and been entirely lost; for they were voices of spirits and goblins.’...

“As Yule rightly observes, ‘these Goblins are not peculiar to the Gobi.’  Yet I felt more than ever assured that Marco’s stories about them were of genuine local growth, when I had travelled over the whole route and seen how closely its topographical features agree with the matter-of-fact details which the first part of his chapter records.  Anticipating my subsequent observations, I may state here at once that Marco’s estimate of the distance and the number of marches on this desert crossing proved perfectly correct.  For the route from Charklik, his ‘town of Lop,’ to the ‘City of Sachiu,’ i.e.  Sha-chou or Tun-huang, our plane-table survey, checked by cyclometer readings, showed an aggregate marching distance of close on 380 miles.”

XXXIX., p. 196.

OF THE CITY OF LOP AND THE GREAT DESERT.

“In the hope of contributing something toward the solution of these questions [contradictory statements of Prjevalsky, Richthofen, and Sven Hedin],” writes Huntington, “I planned to travel completely around the unexplored part of the ancient lake, crossing the Lop desert in its widest part.  As a result of the journey, I became convinced that two thousand years ago the lake was of great size, covering both the ancient and the modern locations; then it contracted, and occupied only the site shown on the Chinese maps; again, in the Middle Ages, it expanded; and at present it has contracted and occupies the modern site.

“Now, as in Marco Polo’s days, the traveller must equip his caravan for the desert at Charklik, also known as Lop, two days’ journey south-west of the lake.” (Ellsworth HUNTINGTON, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 240-1.)

XXXIX., pp. 197, 201.

NOISES IN THE GREAT DESERT.

As an answer to a paper by C. TOMLINSON, in Nature, Nov. 28, 1895, p. 78, we find in the same periodical, April 30, 1896, LIII., p. 605, the following note by KUMAGUSU MINAKATA:  “The following passage in a Chinese itinerary of Central Asia—­Chun Yuen’s Si-yih-kien-wan-luh, 1777 (British Museum, No. 15271, b. 14), tom.  VII., fol. 13 b.—­appears to describe the icy sounds similar to what Ma or Head observed in North America (see supra, ibid., p. 78).