IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
| |||||||||
|
| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.1 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Citation Information
270 AT THE NIYA SITE RUINS CH. XXIII
exposure to the desert winds had left nothing for me to dig here. But the mere fact of the area of ancient occupation stretching so far south was important. In any case there was the joyful sensation of finding myself once more among the shrivelled trunks of poplars and fruit trees which had flourished when there was still an Imperial Rome.
After regaining the route we again passed for more than a mile through a belt of big living Toghraks. Most of them, by the size of their trunks and their much-fissured bark, seemed of great age, and plenty of dead trees were lying in the thickets between them. Here and there I caught sight of a narrow and tortuous channel emerging from the sand, probably cut by the last summer flood
which the dying river had succeeded in pushing out to to
this border area of dead and living forest. But that
may have been centuries ago, since the great depth to x~
which such large specimens of the wild poplar are known sip
to send down their roots would make them independent }~
of occasional surface watering. We had left these trees with their bright-coloured foliage behind us, and wound
our way for a mile north-westwards through a sombre
maze of tamarisk-covered conical sand-hills, when I found a
myself once more at the spot where rows of completely bleached trunks of poplars and mulberry trees, much splintered yet upright, mark an ancient orchard or farmyard already noticed in 1901. The sand here seemed now less heavy, and for a distance of some sixty yards I could follow the line of ancient trees planted at regular intervals.
From here the route followed by Saduk, the shepherd guide from the Mazar, who had marched ahead with the water-carrying camels, seemed to strike slightly more westwards than the one I had taken in 1901. After less than half a mile it emerged, to my surprise, upon a small open plain, about 30o yards long from south-east to north-west, where, by the side of bare, eroded ground strewn with hard débris, substantial rush-built fences and avenues of poplars could clearly be traced in the low sand. Near the centre of this area a small plateau rising island-
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright (C) 2003-2019 National Institute of Informatics and The Toyo Bunko. All Rights Reserved.