would strike the line of the ancient wall in the middle. On April 5th, the day of our start, more Cathaico, neither camels nor men turned up until quite late in the forenoon. Since the first march along the Tang Ho was bound to be short, this luckily mattered little. Where we crossed the river just outside the west gate I found its water flowing in a channel about forty yards wide and three to four feet deep, with a velocity of about two yards per second. All the canals of Tun-huang, taking off well above this, were flowing over-full at the same time. There could be no doubt that at this season of the early spring irrigation the supply of available water more than sufficed for the needs of the present cultivated area.
On the left river bank we first skirted the crumbling clay walls of the old town of Tun-huang, a site said to have been occupied in T'ang times but now completely abandoned to fields and gardens. A subsequent measurement of the rectangular area enclosed by the walls, about 1500 yards from north to south and 65o across, showed that it was but slightly smaller than that of the present town, which is built within walls about r ioo yards square. Then we turned off to the south-west, and passing several well-kept temples, reached the edge of cultivation after a little over three miles. Here the ruins of a smaller walled town offered fresh proof of the destruction which followed the last great Tungan rising.
Beyond we followed the banks of an earlier river bed, now completely dry and flanked on each side by a network of wind-eroded clay terraces. After some five miles farther, and not far from a modern-looking ` Pao-t'ai,' I noticed ruined walls rising here and there above the bare gravel Sai westwards. Crossing the large canal which passes here close to the route, and conveys water for the western part of the Tun-huang oasis, I rode towards these walls and soon noticed that they invariably represented gateways to quadrangular enclosures which seemed completely decayed. The gateways, on the other hand, looked solid enough, rising in several cases to a height of about twenty feet and showing a thickness of eight feet. But these wall portions on either side of a wide entrance
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