Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/90

 Rh even 'nation,' would be unlikely to draw any distinction between a built and permanent town, and an encampment of felt tents—an urdu or an aul, as the Turki words are. In several cases Mirza Haidar mentions towns of Moghulistan as existing in the form of ruins only, and he is explicit on this point. But he nowhere describes one as an inhabited centre at his own time, though it is only reasonable to suppose that he would, at least, have made some mention of them had they existed, in the same way that he speaks of, and even describes, those of Alti-Shahr. The aul, or collection of felt tents, pitched without order or any view to permanency, near the banks of a stream, and in the centre of some district where pasture was near at hand, was probably the nearest approach to a town at the period our history belongs to. Here, possibly, a square or oblong shed of brown mud bricks, ornamented with yaks' tails, antelopes' heads, and rows of small, coloured flags, may have stood to represent the urdu proper, or reception-room and court-house of the chief; while round it were scattered the dome-shaped tents of willow laths, covered with sheets of felt—all grimy and greasy—and ready at any moment to be taken down by the women of the tribe, and packed, with the rest of their domestic belongings, on the backs of the camels. Of forts, walls, or streets there could have been no sign. In the daytime, the ground on which the encampment stood would have been black with the dried droppings of sheep, a foot in depth, which, whirled into the air by the west wind, would pervade, with its pungent smell, the valley for a mile round, and cover everything, even the surface of the river, with a film of black. By the evening, this unsavoury carpet would be overlaid by thousands of sheep, driven in from the neighbouring glens and packed close, in scarcely separated flocks, for the night, while outside these, long rows of camels would kneel at their tethering-ropes, and groups of shaggy ponies stand fastened to the doors of their masters' tents. Near at hand, it may be, some ruined walls or weather-worn mounds pointed to the remains of an Uighur town, or fort, destroyed hundreds of years ago, and having no more connection with the life of the people of the aul than have the ruins of an Elizabethan castle, or a Norman keep, with the inhabitants of a neighbouring county town in England at the present day.

Encampments such as these would not only leave no trace of where they stood, but even their names would be unlikely to endure in history. Such were, no doubt, At-Báshi, Kuchkar,