Innermost Asia : vol.2 / Page 222 (Color Image)

0222	Innermost Asia : vol.2

the left bank and followed its winding course for some five miles to the neighbourhood of our
camp. In spite of a close look-out, no trace was found of ancient occupation in the shape of
pottery, timber debris, or the like. Nor did we, in the course of the next two days' marches, come
upon any such extensive ' Tatis ' as one might have expected from a certain reference, in con-
nexion with the Kuruk-daryā, to ' prosperous villages [having] covered the country for scores of
miles '.¹²

Anxiety
about
Afrāz-gul's
party. From our camp between L.S. and L.T. I decided on March 11th to turn westwards, in order
to trace the Kuruk-daryā over a small portion of its course that had not been surveyed either by
Dr. Hedin or by Lāl Singh. The latter had closely followed the left bank of the ancient river-bed
for over two marches eastwards before turning off to Āltmish-bulak, and had found only one
more ancient burial-place on the edge of the gravel Sai along which his route led almost all the
way. This point (Map No. 29. c. 3) lay fully twenty miles away from our position, and the
description given by Lāl Singh of his ' Cemetery No. 3 ' indicated that it was of just the same
type as the two we had already searched. A visit to it would have cost us three days and involved
considerable fatigue for the camels owing to the increasing warmth of the days. My increasing
anxiety about Afrāz-gul and his party was an additional reason for forgoing this eastward extension
of our search. His arrival at our proposed rendezvous at Ying-p'an was now several days overdue ;
to move farther east entailed a risk of missing him when he passed along the foot of the Yārdang-
bulak-tāgh, as arranged in the instructions I had given him. The fires we had kept burning day
and night on a high tamarisk-cone near C. ccxliii in the hope of eventually attracting his attention
had failed to relieve my anxiety about the party. Yet both smoke in daytime and fire in the dark
are visible for great distances in the desert under tolerably clear atmospheric conditions such as
had fortunately favoured us during these days.

Wind-
eroded
ground
to south. So on March 11th we set out to the south-west in order to see something of the country beyond
the right bank of the river. After crossing ground eroded by the wind into low terraces and trenches
all running north to south, we struck the bed again, and cutting across one of its many smaller
meanders reached a point about three miles from camp where, at a sharp bend to the north-west,
the sand at the bottom, some 15 feet below the bank, felt distinctly moist and there was abundance
of living thorny scrub. But on the banks the beds of reeds and other vegetation were all dead.
Even these quickly disappeared, as we passed into a maze of small Yārdangs, from 4 to 8 feet in
height, cut up into short strips and knolls as seen in Fig. 335. As we threaded our way across this
curiously reticulated ground, drift-sand in the hollows became steadily more plentiful, and after
about three miles of such going we reached the edge of an area completely covered by dunes.
They soon rose to 20 or 30 feet in height, forming small Dawāns or ridges such as I had found on
a much larger scale in 1906 on my way from the Lou-lan site to the Tārim. Whatever dead wood
was to be found in the troughs between them was all bleached and shapeless owing to great age.
Evidently the period when the riverine belt had here extended farther to the south lay very far back.
From the top of the ridges no indication of other dead river-courses could be sighted. Their
existence farther south, however, is suggested by the bearings of the old beds which both Afrāz-gul
and myself had come upon when traversing the dune-covered desert area to the west and south-west
of the Lou-lan site.

Well sunk
in dry
river-bed. The difficulty of crossing these close-set sand ridges with the camels had made us turn again
to the north-west.¹³ There we came upon a small depression where the soil at the bottom felt
moist, and close by picked up two small fragments of coarse pottery and a small lump of copper

National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

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National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

Citation Information

OCR Text

National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books