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Show 8:2 STEPPES AND DESERTS. like yellow clouds. In the summer the heat is exceedingly great, and in winter there is here, as at Turfan, neither severe cold nor heavy snow." The district round Khotan, Kashgar, and Yarkand, still pays its tribute in home-grown cotton as it did in the time of Marco-Polo. (Il Milione di Marco Polo, pubbl. dal Conte Baldelli, t. i. pp. 32 and 87.) In the Oasis of Hami (Khamil), above 200 miles east of Aksu, orange trees, pomegranates, and vines, whose fruit is of a superior quality, grow and flourish. The products of cultivation which are thus noticed imply the existence of only a small degree of elevation, and that over extensive districts. At so great a distance from any coast, and in those easterly meridians where the cold of winter is known to exceed that of corresponding latitudes nearer our own part of the world, a plateau which should be as high as Madrid or Munich might indeed have very hot summers, but would hardly have, in 43° and 44° latitude, extremely mild winters with scarcely any snow. Near the Caspian, 83 English feet below the level of the Black Sea, at Astrachan, in 46° 21' lat., I saw the cultivation of the vine greatly favored by a high degree of summer heat; but the winter cold is there from -20° to -25° Cent. (-4° to -13° Fahr.) It is therefore necessary to protect the vines after November, by sinking them deep in the earth. Plants which live, as we may say, only in the summer, as the vine, the cotton bush, rice, and melons, may indeed be cultivated with success between the latitudes of 40° and 44° on plains of more than 500 toises (3197 English feet) elevation, being favored by the powerful radiant heat; but how could the pomegranate trees of Aksu, and the orange trees of Hami, whose fruit Pere Grosier extolled as distinguished for its goodness, bear the cold of the long and severe winter which would be the necessary consequence of a considerable elevation of the land? ( Asie Centrale, t. ii. pp. 48-52, and 429.) Carl Zimmerman (in the learned Analysis of his "Karte von Inner Asien," 1841, s. 99) has made it appear extremely probable that the Tarim depression, i. e., the desert between the mountain chains of the 'l hion-schan and the Kuen-liin, where the Steppe river Tarim-go! empties itself into the Lake of Lop, which used to be described as an alpine lake, is hardly 1200 (1279 English) feet above the level of the sea, or only twice |