IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
242 THE SHRINES OF KHADALIK CH. XX
In spite of all efforts, and of the large number of men
kept at work, the excavation of this temple was not com-
pleted until the evening of the third day,—so great was
the mass of sand and débris which had to be shifted, and
so rich the yield of manuscript leaves, relievo fragments
in stucco and wood, and pieces of frescoed wall plaster,
which had to be collected with care and marked. For
the detailed examination of them there was no time then.
Tired out as I was by the long day's work at the ruin, I
had to labour well into the night cleaning the sand crusts
off the manuscript remains—they could not otherwise have
been packed safely—and recording exact details as to the
place and conditions of all the more important finds. Among
striking observations thus gathered on the spot only a few
can be mentioned here. Again and again I came upon
leaves from the same texts in Brahmi writing which
had turned up in widely separated parts of the building,
a proof that the worshipper depositing them had, as in
the case of the shrine excavated at Endere in Igo', tried
to please with his offerings as many as possible of the
divinities represented among the sculptures and frescoes
of the temple.
That there had been Chinese, too, among the pious
visitors was proved by the discovery of two well-preserved
rolls of paper, one fully thirty-six by ten inches, evidently
parts of the same manuscript, showing a neatly written
Chinese Buddhist text on one side and an equally extensive
text in cursive Brahmi script on the other. Closer study
of the latter was impossible at the time. Yet the mere
hope that it might be a translation of the Chinese text
on the obverse, and thus prove thereafter in the hands of
an expert collaborator to furnish a key for the decipherment
of the ` unknown ' language of Buddhist Khotan, was by
itself no small encouragement. The total number of
separately marked manuscript packets, containing larger
portions of texts or else collections of fragments, amounted
in the end to over 23o.
In the course of the second day I found my architectural
conclusions confirmed by the discovery of a large central
image base and of remains of frescoed walls which had
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