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0369 Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.1
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.1 / Page 369 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000213
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CH. XIX

THE STUPA OF RAWAK   223

my excavations around it in 1901. All the more striking was the change in its surroundings which the first glance revealed. The mighty dunes which then covered fully three-quarters of the great quadrangle enclosing the relic tower, had moved on considerably farther east. The south-west wall, where I had excavated some of the best-preserved colossal statues of the shrine, was now almost completely hidden under a ridge of sand some twenty feet high. Of the south-east face, too, less emerged from the sand than before, yet enough to show me the destruction which had been dealt here by the hand of man since my visit. The wall, which I had found lined with a continuous row of large relievos in stucco, shown in the plates of Ancient Khotan, now displayed bare brickwork. A large party of Chinese jade-diggers from Kumat, so I was told, had come here two years before to try their luck at seeking for ` treasure,' and attacking the only accessible part of the enclosing wall had stripped it completely of its friable stucco images. My care in burying these again under sand just as I found them had proved in vain.

The movement of the dunes had curiously changed the aspect of the Stupa itself. Whereas its imposing base of three stories was five years before almost entirely covered by drift sand except to the south-east, its uppermost portion now emerged free on all sides (Fig. 73). But below this there still remained some seventeen or eighteen feet of sand filling the court, and a complete clearing of the latter was now quite as impracticable, without a disproportionate expenditure of time and money, as when I first explored the great ruin. The exact comparison of the sand conditions with those recorded on my previous visit had a special interest ; for it fully supported the view already suggested that the high dunes observed in this part of the desert are the direct product of the fine alluvial deposit left behind by the river floods along its banks and thence carried into the desert in the direction where the alternating east and west winds have most play.

The patch of eroded bare ground westwards where I had camped in those hot and dusty April days, was now