As To Cooking, We Found That Rice, Dal, And Potatoes
Would Never Soften Properly, No Matter How Long They Were Boiled.
This, of
course, was due to the boiling-point being only from 170 deg.
To 180 deg.. Our
tea, moreover, suffered from the same cause, and was never good when we
were over 15,000 feet. This was very marked. Some of my natives made
dreadful complaints about the rice and dal that they got from the
village-heads in the valleys, and vowed that they only gave them what was
very old and hard, as they could not soften it!"
[Illustration: MARCO POLO'S ITINERARIES
No. III
Regions on and near the Upper Oxus]
NOTE 3. - Bolor is a subject which it would take several pages to discuss
with fulness, and I must refer for such fuller discussion to a paper in
the J. R. G. S. vol. xlii. p. 473.
The name Bolor is very old, occurring in Hiuen Tsang's Travels (7th
century), and in still older Chinese works of like character. General
Cunningham has told us that Balti is still termed Balor by the Dards of
Gilghit; and Mr. Shaw, that Palor is an old name still sometimes used by
the Kirghiz for the upper part of Chitral. The indications of Hiuen Tsang
are in accordance with General Cunningham's information; and the fact that
Chitral is described under the name of Bolor in Chinese works of the last
century entirely justifies that of Mr. Shaw. A Pushtu poem of the 17th
century, translated by Major Raverty, assigns the mountains of
Bilaur-istan, as the northern boundary of Swat. The collation of these
indications shows that the term Bolor must have been applied somewhat
extensively to the high regions adjoining the southern margin of Pamir.
And a passage in the Tarikh Rashidi, written at Kashgar in the 16th
century by a cousin of the great Baber, affords us a definition of the
tract to which, in its larger sense, the name was thus applied: "Malaur
(i.e. Balaur or Bolor) ... is a country with few level spots. It has a
circuit of four months' march. The eastern frontier borders on Kashgar and
Yarkand; it has Badakhshan to the north, Kabul to the west, and Kashmir to
the south." The writer was thoroughly acquainted with his subject, and the
region which he so defines must have embraced Sirikol and all the wild
country south of Yarkand, Balti, Gilghit, Yasin, Chitral, and perhaps
Kafiristan. This enables us to understand Polo's use of the term.
The name of Bolor in later days has been in a manner a symbol of
controversy. It is prominent in the apocryphal travels of George Ludwig
von - - , preserved in the Military Archives at St. Petersburg. That work
represents a town of Bolor as existing to the north of Badakhshan, with
Wakhan still further to the north. This geography we now know to be
entirely erroneous, but it is in full accordance with the maps and tables
of the Jesuit missionaries and their pupils, who accompanied the Chinese
troops to Kashgar in 1758-1759.
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