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0369 Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2
中国砂漠地帯の遺跡 : vol.2
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 / 369 ページ(カラー画像)

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doi: 10.20676/00000213
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tzŭ. Our age-bent guide, trotting ahead on a diminutive
donkey, had no explanations to offer. So to the pleasure
of groping in growing darkness along a slippery, half-sub-
merged rut, there was added uncertainty as to when and
where we might again meet with our baggage.

At last about 10 P.M. loud barking told us that we were
near some inhabited spot which proved to be an outlying
farm of Ch'iao-tzŭ. Half-a-mile farther east our hapless
'Ya-i,' already half-overcome by fatigue, conducted us to a
small group of homesteads which he declared to be the
chief place of the oasis. It took time before we had aroused
some men from their slumber, while a dozen or more of
ferocious curs were yelping around us. The peasants had
not seen or heard any carts pass, and with that persistent
display of ignorance which seems to characterize these
honest but wary folk on the Kan-su borders, refused to
offer the slightest suggestion as to any other route the
carts might possibly have followed under their far more
intelligent guide supplied by the military commandant.
Chiang would have gladly taken shelter then and there,
in spite of the squalid look of the dwellings and his
well-justified anger at the incompetence of the helpless
representative of the civil powers.

But I was not prepared to give in so readily, and when
Chiang had refreshed himself with my ultra-dry rusks—
with satisfaction I watched him empty the little tin before
he could realize in the darkness that there was nothing
left for me—we set out for a fresh search. The rain
had now stopped, but none of the drowsy villagers would
act as guide. The 'Ya-i,' however, ransacking the dim
corners of his memory, thought he had once in his younger
days been to a part of the oasis known as 'South
Ch'iao-tzŭ' which might be worth searching. Alas! we
had not got far in the darkness before the old man's
flickering sense of locality gave out completely. Stumbling
at a lonely farm which he pretended was 'Nan-Ch'iao-tzŭ,
we received the not wholly unexpected information that
nothing was known of our carts and people. So I resigned
myself to spending the hours till daylight at what our
'Ya-i' had hailed as the best quarters of Ch'iao-tzŭ.