Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/33

their definite character. These points are the southwest of Yunnan Province, where access to Chinese territory from Annam, Siam, and Burmah is comparatively easy; the northwestern border between Ili and the Kirghis steppe, and the northeastern, or Trans-Amur, district. It is worthy of note that the tide of Western aggression threatens to roll into China from these three points; Russia being the motive force in the northeast and the northwest, France and England in the southwest. Of course the whole of the eastern sea-board is a line of general invasion.

Another natural barrier which helps to segregate China on the north is the vast Desert of Gobi, having a length of 2,200 miles and varying in width from 150 to 600 miles. Over this celebrated waste, which covers nearly a million square miles, insufferable heat broods in summer and almost unendurable cold prevails in winter, and the danger of crossing the vast expanse is accentuated by shifting sand hills. It is in the western region of this desert and among the peaks of the Kwan-lun mountains that the deities and demons of Taoism and Buddhism are supposed to exercise their mystic sway. In the western section of the Gobi Desert there lies, along the southern slopes of the Celestial Mountains, a strip of arable land from fifty to eighty miles wide, watered by the Tarim River and its branches. This strip is tolerably fertile, and within it lie all the Mohammedan cities and forts of the Nan Lu, which are under