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0122	Innermost Asia : vol.2
極奥アジア : vol.2

way of precious metals, &c. ; for trees are very scarce in the oases, cattle-dung also, and fuel
accordingly at a high price.

The desire of the villagers to ascribe the wholesale opening of these tombs to the truculent
Tungans was probably prompted by the knowledge that, until the recent revolution with its
subversive consequences, the local Mandarins would have effectively checked any open disturbance
of the dead, if only from regard for the feelings of the numerous Chinese traders and cultivators
settled in the Turfān oases. Yet there was reason to believe that the gentle native ' Chantos ' of
the neighbouring villages had not been altogether averse to taking their share in the spoliation of
these tombs, whether openly during the troublesome times of the Muhammadan rebellion or
clandestinely later on, when, to their great relief, peace and order had been re-established under
Chinese rule. Conclusive testimony on this point was supplied by ' Mashik ',² the local tomb
expert, whom the obliging Darōgha of Astāna had brought me to serve as guide, along with our
first contingent of diggers. I was only too glad to employ this intelligent fellow as their foreman ;
for through long practice in this macabre line of business he not only possessed an uncanny fami-
liarity with all that appertained to these abodes of the dead, their personal outfit, &c., but also a
remarkably accurate knowledge as to which tombs had been searched recently for antiques and
which had remained untouched but for the unsophisticated exploitation attributed to the Tungans.
Considering the very large number of tombs and the importance of economizing time, this knowledge
was of obvious value to us and fully worth the rewards which secured that it should be honestly
applied.

Mashik stated that he had been initiated into this business by his father, who had died at a
great age some twenty years before. Others remembered hearing the old man talk of his tomb
experiences during Tungan times and later on in the days when the digging had to be done more
or less secretly at night. Mashik himself claimed that he had opened more than a hundred tombs
during the last four or five years, when the Chinese administration had ceased to take serious
notice of such proceedings. During that time, certain local Mandarins with modern notions and
antiquarian tastes had directly encouraged them, in order to secure manuscripts and other antiquities
for their own collections of curios. All the more significant was Mashik's emphatic assertion from
the first that among all the tombs that he had examined during these years he had never found a
single one of which the brick wall originally blocking the entrance had not been partly broken
through by some previous searchers. This disappointing experience might well have reduced his
exploratory zeal had not a curious discovery of his own, aided by a peculiar freedom from all
superstitious scruples where the remains of ' dead Kāfirs ' were concerned, enabled honest Mashik
to look for precious metals in places where even greedy Tungans had failed to search for them.

Our work at the Astāna cemeteries was begun on January 19th with the examination of tombs
which, without showing an enclosure of embanked gravel, might yet, by their arrangement in
more or less parallel rows, be recognized as a separate group marking the extreme north-eastern
extremity of the area (see Pl. 31). Among this group, Ast. i, the arrangement of which is
shown in Pl. 32, a considerable number of tombs had manifestly been searched in recent years.
But in the middle row the majority appeared to have escaped. The six tombs here succes-
sively opened by us were all, as the sketches in Pl. 32 show, approached by a trench, about 3 or 4 feet
wide on the average at the bottom, leading down from the surface of the ground to a depth which
varied, as practically in all other Astāna tombs, from 12 to 16 feet. At its end the trench gave
access to a narrow rock-cut entrance, about 3 feet wide and only 3 to 4 feet high ; from this the

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