Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/568

190 camel lying in the river-bed. They had spoken to him, but he had cried only, 'Water! water!' They had given him drink and food. I recognized that this was Islam-Bai. I sent a shepherd to fetch him, and in a few days Islam arrived with Kasim and the camel. He had saved all my money, some instruments, and my maps and notes. I felt quite rich.

"I could not continue my journey without the hypsometrical instruments, which had been lost, and so I had to go back to Kashgar to get a new outfit. From Kashgar I sent couriers with telegrams to Europe, via the Russian Turkestan, asking for a new supply of things. Whilst awaiting their arrival I returned to the Pamirs, and explored the northern slopes of the Hindoo Koosh, and visited the sources of the Amu-Darya. In August I fell in with the Russian-English Boundary Commission, and spent three very pleasant weeks with them."

Great as Dr. Hedin's sufferings had been they did not deter him from another journey of exploration in the desert. "I wanted to see if there were any old towns. This time I marched from south to north. After a seven days' march I came upon the ruins of a very old town. In the valleys between the sand dunes there rose wooden posts, or stakes, of poplar wood, hard as stone. These had been part of the framework of the houses, the skeletons of the houses, and innumerable they were, everywhere in the valleys of the dunes. It must have been a very big town. I camped here, but was not able to stay more than two days lest my water supply should be exhausted too soon. But during those two days we dug in the sand and found fragments of the plaster walls of the houses, which were covered with beautiful paintings. Then I myself made a great discovery. It was a fragment of an old manuscript, on something which looks like paper, but is not paper. Some of the characters resemble Sanscrit, but they are not Sanscrit. Afterwards I sent agents back to search for other manuscripts, and they found some more. We found nothing else, for we could not stay long, and we could not dig deep, for the



sand keeps falling in. But I do not think there can be much to find there beyond the mural paintings, for no doubt these towns were gradually abandoned by their inhabitants as the sand kept coming up, just as in a few hundred years the towns on the southern fringe of the desert will all be abandoned; the siege of them, Guma, Cherchen, and Nia, having already begun.

"From the first town I proceeded eastward, and in about a week's march I discovered the second of the towns; but here I found nothing. I shall return there, of course, for I consider this one of the most interesting discoveries ever made. It was certainly the most curious thing that occurred to me during my four years' journey. No traveler ever expected to find anything here, and it was given to me to discover the traces of Buddhist civilization in a Mohammedan land, towns where, to judge from the very high point of development of the mural paintings, the state of civilization must have been very far advanced. Buddhists the inhabitants certainly were, for some of the ornamentations are pure Buddha, and on one of the fragments in my possession is a painting of Buddha sitting on a lotus."

"Can you fix the epoch?"

"Not at all. The only thing that I can say with absolute certainty is that they existed before the Mohammedan era. There are no Buddhists now in those parts of Asia. I shall have to study Buddhist art very carefully to be able to fix the approximate date of the building of these towns. Another thing which will help me is the observations I made of the speed at which the sand dunes progress. I have data. During my march in the desert I experimented on the progress of the moving dunes. When a storm of wind came on, I planted a post at the top of a dune, and after the storm had passed I measured the distance between the post and the top of the dune, which had advanced in the meanwhile, and noted the time in which this progress had taken place. When I have calculated this out, and so discovered how long it took to transform a rich, fertile, and well-watered land into a desert waste of sand, I shall be better able to fix the period. It will