west over ground where low dunes alternated with extensive stretches of ` Tati,' I found there the outlines of a small quadrangular Buddhist temple, about twenty-five by twenty-three feet, clearly recognizable by clay walls almost flush with the flat eroded loess soil around. Fragments of plaster relievos exactly similar to those which once adorned the walls of the larger shrine could be picked up on the surface ; and some more turned up when I had the interior of the cella cleared down to the original floor, only one and a half feet below the present surface. Here, too, the enclosing quadrangular passage could be traced with certainty.
The remains of this little shrine lay fully exposed on a flat débris - strewn area clear of dunes, which my guides knew by the name of Siyelik, and it was easy here to study the present conditions which account for the appearance of the ruin. Vegetable fibres and roots permeating the layer of earth and mud-brick débris which filled the cella, proved plainly that the ruin after its abandonment must have been buried for a time under a gradually accumulating and cultivated loess layer. When cultivation retreated from the site, wind erosion must have been at work for a prolonged period. Small loess banks up to six feet in height, generally bearing on their top heavy pottery débris which seemed to have protected them, rise as ` witnesses ' over the general level of the ` Tati ' quite close to the shrine, marking the extent to which the surface of the ground has been lowered. From the mass of human bones which mingled with pottery débris around the ruined cella, it was certain that the soil, now again carried off by the winds, had once served for interment. The inference seems justified that a burial-ground had been established here in early Muhammadan times, because the site once occupied by a Buddhist sanctuary continued to receive local worship as a Mazar. Also quite close to the ruined temple first discovered I noticed between the dunes large stretches of eroded ground thickly strewn with human bones, to which the same explanation would apply.
Plentiful matter for antiquarian speculations of this kind was offered by the silent Tatis extending here to east and
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