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| 0174 |
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 |
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afield were concluded, I set about to search the ground
systematically.
It was not long before I discovered fragments of that
hard, dark grey pottery with which my work at other watch-
stations had made me familiar, at the foot of a hillock rising
less than a hundred yards to the north of the fort (Fig. 179).
While Chiang and the Naik were engaged at the nearest
watch-tower to the west, I had retained with me the least
indolent of our men for prospecting; and as I made him
scrape the slope of the mound at different points, layers of
straw and other stable refuse came to light quickly at more
than one point below the cover of gravel. I was con-
ducting this first experimental search near the top of the
west slope when his spade laid bare a vertical cutting into
the hard clay composing the hillock.
It proved to be the mouth of a little tunnel about two
and a half feet broad and about as high, running into the
mound and filled with drift sand and refuse. Before I
could form any view about its purpose, two dozen Chinese
slips had emerged among pieces of blank stationery, mat-
ting, bones, and similar rubbish. Soon my digger had
burrowed out of sight while clearing the tunnel. After
making his way in for some ten feet, he reported that it led
to a room completely filled with sand. No further work
was possible here until the other men came back from their
day's task. But the spirits of my own 'prospector' had been
roused by a liberal reward for his discovery, and quickly he
set about scraping elsewhere. Not far from the tunnel, but
lower down on the slope, he unearthed a platform cut into
the soft rock, and here another score of tablets turned up
in excellent preservation. Of course I had sent word to
Chiang-ssŭ-yeh, and when he arrived from the tower then
'in hand' two miles off, an eager scanning of the last finds
began.
Many of the narrow slips of wood were covered with
minute but well-written characters in several columns, and
great was my joy when the dated pieces among those
unearthed on the platform proved to belong to the period
48-45 B.C. So at last we had got well back into the pre-
Christian era. All the dated records found in that queer
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