a short way, and I never knew it. But how did the Sahib know ? Have you been here before ? No ? Then it 's a miracle."
The trees among the northern ruins of Tuholo are significant. They prove, in the first place, that a long period of uninterrupted cultivation must have elapsed in order to allow some of them to attain a diameter of four feet. And in the next, they furnish an important suggestion as to the gradual manner in which the oasis was abandoned. Among the older ruins to the north, and even in the centre, near the stupa, the trees have entirely disappeared. This apparently means that they were cut down after the farms had been abandoned. Here, in the latest ruins, however, splendid trees were left standing. Probably the people of this most southerly village, after having cut down the orchards left by their neighbors farther down the river to the north, were themselves obliged to move away and abandon their own trees. The cutting down of all the trees of old Dumuka by the people of new Dumuka is a modern parallel case. If the present Dumuka should now be deserted, its trees would be left as evidence of the progressive abandonment of site after site. Among the Niya ruins, exactly as at Tuholo, valuable trees were left unused among the later ruins, although all were cut off farther downstream, where the farms appear to have been abandoned earlier. The condition of the pottery in the still more ancient part of the ruins, as we have already seen, gives similar evidence that on the Niya and Endereh rivers, as well as on the Chira, the old oases were abandoned little by little, beginning with the remoter portions where the water supply was more precarious.
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