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0528 Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.1
中国砂漠地帯の遺跡 : vol.1
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.1 / 528 ページ(カラー画像)

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doi: 10.20676/00000213
引用形式選択: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR読み取り結果

 

330 ALONG THE CHARCHAN RIVER CH. XXVIII

group of the ' old walls,' ` Kone-tamlik,' as he called the site, the true explanation very soon revealed itself. Here I saw a row of over a dozen rectangular enclosures, built in

the same brickwork but more completely preserved, stretching from east to west along the top of a low ridge. Their size varied greatly, the largest measuring fifty by forty-two feet ; but each showed on one side a narrow arched gateway standing to a greater height than the rest of the walls. Everything recalled the walled enclosures so

frequently met with in Muhammadan cemeteries farther west, and the discovery of a grave outside one of the enclosures near the edge of the ridge confirmed the conjecture.

A row of rough Toghrak branches covered the coffin, which was formed of a hollowed tree trunk ; and when the men with me had scraped away enough of the soil to display the feet of a skeleton turned due south, it became quite certain that we were at a resting-place of the Faithful. So satisfied about the character of the ruins, I could let the dead remain undisturbed in this desolate cemetery. The portion of the grave exposed was properly covered up again before we left for the long march still before us. Finds of chronological value could not be expected in Muhammadan graves, and to collect anthropological measurements from the dead buried here would have implied prolonged stay and such labour as neither the men nor myself would have cared for.

Even without more definite evidence as to date, the discovery of these remains had its geographical value ; for it made it quite clear that at a period not very remote, when the Charchan River followed a more southerly course, perhaps the one marked by the line of marshes we had been skirting, an agricultural settlement had been able to maintain itself here for a time under physical conditions probably not very different from those about Tatran. Now the shift of the river northward and the probable progress of desiccation in the meantime had brought a dismal change over the adjoining ground. We had to cross extensive stretches of soil encrusted with hard cakes of salt, and to pick our way warily between morne salt lagoons where