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0124 Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 / Page 124 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000213
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78   TO THE NAN-HU OASIS

CH. LV1

physical changes which have since taken place here. That desiccation had played a main part in bringing about the

present conditions was clear.   But in addition I could
convince myself also of the destructive effect which occasional great floods might have had upon irrigation in such a position. I ascertained that the water-supply of the ` Tati ' area must have been derived from a river bed now completely dry which skirts the belt of scrub and drift sand fringing the oasis on the east and north-east. It must have been the action of exceptional rain floods from the lower hills on the south, such as the villagers remembered in recent years, which had gradually turned this river bed into a deep-cut canon-like ` Yar.' As such it passes close to the east of the old site, with some springs gathering in its marshy bottom fifty feet or so below the level of the Tati.

The water here rising had, until about fourteen years before my visit, been utilized for a small colony which existed some three miles lower down in this valley ; it had as it were taken the place of the large settlement abandoned since the T'ang times. But a big flood, said to have occurred in the summer of 1893, had swept away irrigation channels and homesteads, and buried the fields under coarse sand. On visiting the spot I could still see clearly the effects of this catastrophe in the ruined houses and uprooted arbours, while the bed of the irrigating stream had been scooped out into a steep-walled ` Yar,' some twenty feet below the old level. What trees had been left standing were dead or dying, and gradually being cut down for fuel.

Curiously enough, it was information about another effect of this big flood which helped to clear up the mystery about that strange gravel embankment we had noted in the desert on our way to Nan-hu. I found that the tower

towards which we had then seen it continuing rose on the edge of the gravel plateau which overlooks from the east

the wind-eroded old site or Tati. Between this and the tower lay the deep ` Yar ' or flood-bed just referred to. The tower was undoubtedly old in its solid clay portion, rising on a base about thirty - six feet square ; but