We left Tupchek on the 16th of September, recrossing the Gardanikaftar to Liangar. A night was spent on the banks of the Zeriu-zamin torrent and a visit paid to the glacier snout. Judging from the size of the ice-stream and the volume of water discharged, the neve basins of this valley cannot be much inferior to those of Peter the Great. Branching off from the Khingob at the village of Minadu, we followed a southerly road leading over a set of low passes in a country of rounded and steppe-like hills. A thousand feet or so above Minadu one surveys nearly the whole of the western and snowless end of the chain of Peter the Great. Seen at a distance the landscape of its slopes appears like a plaster model carved with a sharp tracery of ribbed design. A ride of seven hours brought us to Safed-daron (Fig. 164) where we enter the zone of conglomerate rock claiming so large a surface of Eastern Bokhara. At the corner of the road near Pisteliak stands a fine old juniper, and under its shade I took the photograph of Fig. 163, showing how the rim of a scree fan draws a clear boundary line between shifting rubble and settled vegetation. To the right of this scene of tenacious struggle we can discover the lobate snout of an old mudspate whose surface is now completely overgrown with grass and scrubby weeds.

Next we came to Sagirdasht familiar to many travellers as a place of important cross-roads. It is a pass of passes, akin to a turn-table of converging rails. The kishlak lies in a shallow funnel like a pea in an oyster shell (Fig. 165).