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0641 Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2
中国砂漠地帯の遺跡 : vol.2
Ruins of Desert Cathay : vol.2 / 641 ページ(カラー画像)

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doi: 10.20676/00000213
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Kochkar-öghil. My joy at again greeting these experienced
searchers of 'old things' (Fig. 292) was much increased by
the exact local information they brought, in addition to my
mail bag from Khotan. The men from Shahyar were now
discharged, well pleased with their liberal wages and an
ample *viaticum* in silver with which to make their way to
Khotan, and thence by the trade route homewards. Alas!
by the time I revisited Keriya a month later I heard how
most of these shifty fellows had used the first opportunity
to gamble away with the dice what they had earned by
their trying tramp through the sands.

After a hearty welcome from my old friends, the aged
Sheikhs of Burhanuddin's desert shrine, and a quaint
mendicant pilgrim they sheltered (Fig. 293), I marched
with my band of 'treasure-seekers' by a new route to the
desert belt north of the oasis of Domoko. There, in the
deceptive zone of tamarisk-covered sand-cones, they had suc-
ceeded in tracking an extensive but scattered series of ruined
dwellings with several Buddhist shrines, which had escaped
our search when in 1906 we worked at Khadalik, some
eight miles farther south. The ruins of this site, which
from an adjoining jungle grazing-ground we called Farhad-
Beg-yailaki, had suffered much through the vicinity of
'Old Domoko,' a village which, as described in my former
narrative, was occupied until sixty or seventy years ago.
Yet the excavations which I was able to effect rapidly
during the first half of March, with a relatively large
number of labourers easily recruited from Domoko, were
rewarded by valuable finds of well-preserved manuscripts
in Sanskrit, painted panels, and tablets inscribed in the
language of old Khotan. The time of abandonment here,
as at Khadalik, proved to have been the second half of
the eighth century A.D.

Some of our best finds at this site were made within
a small Buddhist shrine which occupied a quite unusual
position, emerging from the side of a tamarisk-covered sand-
cone about forty feet high (Fig. 294). The relatively
well preserved cella with its massive walls of clay must have
been built when this cone was much lower; for the sand
of the latter now rose fully eighteen feet above the floor.