CH. VI FOOT-BRIDGE ACROSS DRY RIVER 105
other real property buried long centuries since under the silent dunes. Where was the law court which might help me to claim them?
As our work proceeded to the south of the site the surroundings grew, if anything, more sombre and almost lugubrious, in spite of the appearance of still living scrub. The ruins had to be searched for amidst closely set sand-cones raising their heads covered with tangled masses of tamarisk, dead or living, to forty or fifty feet. Ruins just emerging from the foot of sand-hills with deeply eroded ground on the other side made up weird pictures of solitude. The dust haze raised by a cold north-east wind added an appropriately coloured atmosphere. It was almost with a feeling of relief that we emerged at last upon somewhat more open ground towards the southern end of the site. The ruined dwellings were small there; but an inspection of the ground near by revealed features of interest.
Only some sixty yards off the ruin which on my renewed visit had yielded the first tablets there stood a square of dead mulberry trees raising their trunks up to ten feet or more, which had once cast their shade over a tank still marked by a depression (Fig. 6) . The stream from which the canal which once fed the tank must have taken its rise was not far to seek; for behind the nearest ridge of high tamarisk-crowned sand-cones to the west there still lay a foot-bridge about ninety feet long stretched across an unmistakable dry river-bed. Of the trestles which had carried the bridge two still stood upright. Beyond the left bank stretched shrivelled remains of arbours for upwards of 200 yards. For over two miles to the north-west I could follow the traces of the ancient river-bed, in places completely
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