Quote Originally Posted by Charerg View Post
Actually, there could well be rivers. The rivers feeding the Aral sea (Amu Darya and Syr Darya) and ones that feed the lakes of the Tarim basin all originate in mountains, even though they are on the "rain shadow" side. Large mountains are going to have ice caps that will produce water during spring and summer when the ice partially melts. Though it may be that the said rivers sort of "dry up" before reaching the ocean, that can happen with large desert areas. Although there shouldn't be too many (major) rivers.
Except that his map has nothing to do with the Pamir where Amu Darya takes source.

1) The Pamir region is very extended in surface while the range here is thin. As the map shows we have here mostly very low altitudes immediately N of the range.
2) Pamir is farther N (around 40° N) , here it is 30° N
3) Pamir benefits of the largest glaciers outside of polar regions (because of 1). Here it is not the case.
4) Pamir is open in the W side while this range is continuous.
5) Precipitations in the Pamir region are 200-300 mm/year. Here it would be virtually 0. Physics prohibits precipitation in the descending branch of the Hadley cell

Depending on the altitude of the range, there could be some glaciers (or not) which could (or not) create in spring and summer temporary streams which would dry out fast if they flowed in the desert to the N anyway.
But this is anecdotical and most probable is that the glaciers would have all disappeared if there ever were some because his range would be like the Anti Atlas range only with Sahara on the N side instead of an ocean.
That's why there would be no rivers flowing north in the central part.