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| 0167 |
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 |
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railway station. If stacks of what after all is mere straw
could without any special protection withstand the de-
structive effect of two thousand years, the climate and
conditions of the Tun-huang desert may well be credited
with preservative qualities of an exceptional order. The
use made successively of the stored materials would
account for the greatly varying height of the stacks from
one to seven feet still extant at the same watch-station.
But it still remained to explain why some of the stacks
at different posts were found reduced by fire to calcined
fragments. It was easy, of course, to think of wilful
damage done by raiders and the like. But the most
plausible explanation did not suggest itself until M.
Chavannes' translations showed me how frequent are
the references to fire signals in the records from the
watch-stations. No doubt such signals would ordinarily
be lit on the top of the tower. But when time was
pressing, or perhaps a particularly big fire was needed to
penetrate a murky night, it would be simpler to set a
whole stack on fire. The fact that the remains of burnt
stacks were always found at points of the quincunx where
the risk of igniting others was less, supports this inter-
pretation.
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