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| 0489 |
Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan : vol.1 |
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which followed, and which is illustrated by the tortuous line
of route, fully bore out my misgivings. Yet there was interesting
experience to compensate for the trouble and fatigue.
The first couple of miles in a north-westerly direction had
brought us to the limit of the newly irrigated land, when to my
surprise I came upon unmistakable marks of earlier cultivation
beyond. Old fields overgrown with tamarisk and thorny scrub
could be clearly distinguished by the little embankments dividing
them, as well as by the lines of dry 'Ariks' that once carried water
to them. My guides explained that these were the fields of 'old
Ponak' village, which had been abandoned "in their grandfathers'
time," i.e., forty or fifty years ago. Passing along a road still
frequented by the people visiting the cemeteries of the deserted
villages, I arrived some three miles further north-west at the
southern end of the area known as 'old Domoko.' Here the
ruins of mud-built dwellings, constructed exactly like the modern
villages of this tract, seemed to extend, together with the inter-
spersed orchards and cemeteries, for fully three miles from east to
west. The mud walls, strengthened by the insertion of vertical
bundles of Kumush, still often rose 4 to 5 feet above the
ground, and the massive fireplaces were intact even to a greater
height. The deserted homesteads had been stripped of all
materials that could be of use, such as beams, wooden doorposts, &c.;
and as scarcely any sand had accumulated about the crumbling
ruins, their complete disappearance was only a question of time.
The villagers accompanying me, as well as the people I subse-
quently examined on my return to the oasis, all agreed in asserting
that the gradually increasing difficulty of conducting the irrigation
water sufficiently far had caused the cultivated area of these and
some other villages of the Begships of Domoko and Gulakhma to
be shifted as much as six to eight miles further south within the
memory of living men. Local tradition, in fact, maintained that
such shifts of the cultivated land, backwards and forwards, had
occurred repeatedly in the case of these small oases along the road
from Keriya to Chira. Evidence that cannot be detailed here
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