Chinese that even Mr. Macartney confessed himself puzzled as to the real character of certain savoury dishes.
In spite of all the causes making for delay, I pushed on my preparations sufficiently to allow me to fix the time of my start southward for June 23rd. Two days earlier I indulged in a hot midsummer day's outing, in order to visit a ruined site beyond the northern edge of the Kashgar oasis which had escaped me during my previous stay. The ruins of Och-merwan, ` The three windows,' had never been mentioned to me before, probably just because they were familiar to most Europeans stationed at Kashgar. Leaving Chini-bagh by the great route which leads north towards the Artush Valley and the passes across the T'ienshan, I found the ruins where the barren gravel-strewn Dasht of Chamalik Sai skirts the right bank of the Artush River. A much-decayed Stupa, built in sun-dried bricks of large size, rises to a height of some thirty-two feet above a low loess mound, which seems to owe its existence to wind erosion having lowered the adjacent open ground. The much-scoured appearance of the absolutely barren foot-hills beyond the broad and almost wholly dry river-bed, and of those lining its debouchure from the south, bore ample evidence to the great erosive force which the desert winds must exert here even so close to the edge of a large cultivated area.
The outer surface of the solid brick structure had suffered so badly as to render impossible an exact comparison of proportions, etc., in its dome and base stories with those of the Mauri Tim Stupa I had surveyed six years earlier to the north-east of Kashgar. But the size of the bricks and the manner of construction left little doubt about its belonging approximately to the same period. This relic of Buddhist worship sufficed to determine that the ruined walls enclosing two small forts of irregular oblong shape a little to the north-west (Fig. 40), and known locally as Khakanning-shahri, ` The town of the Khakan (or Great Khan),' were also of pre-Muhammadan date. The narrow ridge of clay and gravel which these walls occupy, rises to forty feet and more above the level Dasht southward, and, falling off on the opposite side in precipitous cliffs towards
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