CHAP. XXXII.] VISIT TO KARA-KASH TOWN 487
far away to the west have peacefully absorbed foreign elements more nnunerous and cultured than themselves.
I reached Kara-kash town in the afternoon, after crossing the wide bed of the river from which it is named, and found it a comparatively lively and well-built place. The garden of one of Islam Beg's relations had been hospitably prepared for my reception, and there I was busy until a late hour with the measurement of many heads for anthropological purposes and the record of interesting details about local administration, taxes, &c., for which I had in Islam Beg a first-hand authority.
April 30th was to be my last day within the territory of Khotan. I used it for a long excursion to a ` Tati ' site called Kara-döbe (" ` the Black Mound "), of which Islam Beg had obtained information, away -to the west on the edge of the desert. In order to reach it we had to traverse in succession the remarkably fertile tracts of Bahram-su, Kayesh, Makuya, and Kuya, all stretching in long strips of highly cultivated ground with shady orchards and lanes along their own separate canals fed by the Kara-kash. No more pleasing picture could I retain as a souvenir of rural Khotan. The day was hot and close, and the vision of the mountains had already vanished in the usual haze. So I was quite glad when, after passing for some seven miles over a scrub-covered sandy plain and then through low dunes, Kara-döbe was reached. I found the ground for about a square mile covered with ancient pottery, and in the midst of this débris a small mound of broken masonry. The brick work was undoubtedly old, and might well have belonged once to the base of a Stupa. Elsewhere broken pieces of hard white stucco with relievo ornament possibly represent the last remains of some long-decayed shrine. Heavy dunes of coarse sand, very trying to our ponies, had to be crossed for some four miles before we struck the western bank of a broad marshy Null all in which the stream of Yawa expands among reed-covered lagoons. And when by nightfall I arrived at my camp pitched near the village of Zawa, I might well feel as if, by these changes of rich village land, sandy jungle, high dunes and marsh, Vaisravana, the divine genius loci of
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