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Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1 |
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be the price of the mandarin's luxury if he and his
carpet were of our manufacture! Rugs of raw silk,
not fine in any way, and about five feet by nine,
cost us $12 each; rather dear, we thought. But if
ever there was soreness of heart caused by Khotan-
ese prices there came a day which salved and healed
it all, a day when I bought a mass of old paper,
mere scraps are many of the pieces, but so old, and
so miraculously preserved with their messages from
the dead!
Dead twelve hundred years ago are they who
wrote the strange characters and fashioned the
strange clay heads whose images you see in illustra-
tions here. Forgotten are the societies to which
those dead belonged. Buried in the desert sands
are the cities in which those societies dwelt. Choked
and obliterated are the streams which gave to those
cities the water of life. Can the busy, noisy present
spare a moment to hear the story of the silent
past?
In 1895–96 Sven Hedin discovered ruins of ancient
dwellings in the Taklamakan desert of Eastern (or
Chinese) Turkestan. These ruins are in no sense
impressive from the architect's point of view, being
quite similar to the ordinary Turkestan dwelling of
to-day—plaster or adobe around wooden frames.
But historically they are of prime interest. For
testimony is thus given that civilisation once existed
in regions which are now quite uninhabitable be-
cause they are completely without water. As the
distance of the ruins from present watercourses is
too great to justify the supposition of irrigation
ditches stretching from the one to the other, we are
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