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0162 Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 / Page 162 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000213
Citation Format: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

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io8   ALONG THE ANCIENT WALL CH. LIX

yellowish light as if the plaster coating of their walls were

still intact to make them conspicuous. As they showed

up from afar, with long stretches of the wall between them

often clearly rising as straight brownish lines above the

grey bare gravel desert (Fig. 175), how easy was it to

imagine that towers and wall were still guarded, and that

watchful eyes were scanning the deceptive plateaus and

Nullahs northward with the keenness born of familiarity

with a fleet and artful enemy !

The arrow-heads in bronze which I picked up in

numbers near the wall and towers (Fig. 174, i6) were proof

that attacks and alarms were familiar incidents on this

border. Unconsciously my eye sought the scrub-covered

ground flanking the salt marshes where Hun raiders might

collect before making their rush in the twilight. How

often had I amused myself on the Indian North-West

Frontier with looking out for convenient lines of approach

which our friends, Wazir or Afridi outlaws from across

the border, might fancy ! Once across the chain of posts

the road lay open for Hun raiders to any part of the Tun-

huang oasis or the settlements farther east. It is true the

barren desert stretching north of the wall might have

proved a far more formidable obstacle than the line of watch-

stations itself. But did not those hardy horsemen sweep

across great deserts almost as forbidding before they reached

the Danube plains to become the scourge of the tottering

Roman Empire ? Just as the notion of time, so also the

sense of distance, seemed in danger of being effaced when

I thought how these same Huns, whom the Han emperors

had struggled so long to keep away from their borders,

were destined a few centuries later to shake the forces of

Rome and Byzance.

But the slanting rays of the setting sun would reveal

also things of the past far more real. The line of the wall

showed then quite distinctly for miles and miles, even where

it had decayed to little more than a low long-stretched

mound with reed bundles sticking out (Fig. 176). It was

at that time that the eye most readily caught a curiously

straight furrow-like line running parallel to the wall and at

a distance of some thirty feet within wherever there was a