FROM THE ENDERE RUINS TO CHARCHAN
ON the morning of November 8th I shaped my course into the desert south-eastwards, and after eight miles across low dunes and dreary wastes with tamarisk scrub and salt efflorescence, reached the high Stupa ruin which mounts guard over the ancient site at Endere first visited by me in 1901.
Want of time then had obliged me to confine my exploration to the interior of the ruined fort about one mile to the south-east of the Stupa (Fig. 103), and even within it to leave uncleared some apartments which were too deeply covered with drift sand. So it was with an eased conscience that I once more pitched my camp by its side. A rapid inspection assured me that the remains of the little temple in the centre, which had then disclosed interesting manuscript relics and a Chinese sgraffito inscription of some importance, had not suffered in the interval.
Then I hurried outside to where, only a quarter of a mile to the south, Sadak declared he had found the Kharoshthi tablet which he had shown me at Imam Ja'far's Mazar. The ground there was covered with conical hillocks of sand bearing tamarisk dead or living, eroded banks of bare clay showing up between them. The spot to which Sadak took me without any hesitation looked like one of these terraces, only lower. But on approaching closely I recognized that what rose a few feet above the easy sand slope was not a mere ` witness,' but a solid mass of rubbish with the broken brick walls of a small house emerging through it.
This unpretending ruin had probably been laid bare by
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