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0117 Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 / Page 117 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000213
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the line of the ancient wall in the morning of our start, more Cathayans turned up until quite late in the day. We marched along the Tang Ho was found to be fully matured little. Where we crossed the west gate I found its water flow about forty yards wide and three to four feet deep, with a velocity of about two yards per second. Tun-huang, taking off well above the hill at the same time. There could be this season of the early spring irrigation, little water more than sufficed for the cultivated area.

We ever but we first skirted the crumpled old town of Tun-huang, a site occupied in Tang times but now completely fields and gardens. A subsequent rectangular area enclosed by the walls, 650 yards from north to south and 650 across, slightly smaller than that of the present, with walls about 1100 yards long and off to the south-west, and passing several miles, reached the edge of cultivation at new miles. Here the ruins of a small walled town, fresh proof of the destruction which the T'ang dynasty had wrought.

We followed the banks of an earlier river, dry and flanked on each side by a series of clay terraces. After some five miles, we came from a modern-looking 'Pao-t'ai' of walls rising here and there above the wastelands. Crossing the large canal close to the route, and conveying water to the Tun-huang oasis, I rode towards the quadrangular enclosures which seemed to be the gateways, on the other hand, rising in several cases to a height of eight feet, and showing a thickness of eight feet, portions on either side of a wide entrance.