'I have before me as I write a photo by Sir Aurel Stein showing the body of a man of Turfan buried fifteen centuries ago, and it is hard to belive that he is even dead. And the reason Sir Aurel suggests for this desiccation of Central Asia is, that not so much has the climate changed, as that in the past those areas subsisted in the main on the excess water given by the slow melting of the original ice-cap, since the actual snowfall must have been insufficient to produce glaciers of a size to give their requisite summer volume of water. And so it seems to me that that is to some extent the condition of Ladakh...'