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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[JULY, 1917
Taklamakan in a south-easterly direction. The way in which the bold island-like hills to the east of Maral-bashi have been carved out and isolated by the manifest action of wind-driven sand prolonged through endless ages left little doubt as to how the continuity of that assumed ancient hill range had been broken up. But only actual survey of the ground could supply definite proof.
On October 25 I left Maral-bashi with six hired camels, all I could secure, to act as & "supporting party "to lighten the loads of our own on the initial stages of the desert journey, and three days later we reached the last of those sand-scoured hills in the desert southeastwards, known as Chok-tagh. From a lake near it, which inundations from the Yarkand River feed, but which we found brackish at its end, Hedin had started in May 1896 on that bold journey through the sandy wastes eastward which ended with the destruction of his caravan and his own narrow escape. Steering & south-easterly course we forced our way for three trying marches into the sea of dunes. Closely packed and steep from the start, they grew steadily higher and invariably rose in a line running diagonally across our intended direction. By the second day all trace of vegetation, dead or living, was left behind, and an endless succession of mighty ridges, with not a patch of evel sand between them, faced us. The ridges to be climbed soon reached 200-300 feet in height, and progress became painfully slow with the heavily laden camels. Careful levels taken along our track showed an aggregate ascent of some 400 feet over a single mile's distance, with corresponding descents even more trying to the camels.
It was by far the most forbidding ground I had ever encountered in the Taklamakan. By the evening of the third day the hired camels of the "supporting party " had either broken down completely or showed serious signs of exhaustion. Next morning I ascended the highest dune near our camp, and carefully scanning the horizon saw nothing but the game expanse of formidable sand ridges like huge waves of an angry ocean suddenly arrested in movement. There was a strange allurement in this vista suggesting nature in the contortions of death. But hard as it seemed to resist the syren voices of the desert which called me onwards, I felt forced to turn northward. Though we men might have struggled through, I should probably have had to incur the needless sacrifice of some of our brave camels which were to be the mainstay of our transport for the winter's explorations, besides the loss of indispensable equipment. It was as well that I took that hard decision in time ; for by the third day after there sprung up a violent 'Buran' which, by its bitter cold, proved most trying even where fuel was abundant, and if met with amidst the high sand ridges would have brought us to a stand-still and caused serious suffering and risks.
Sorry as I was to give up the effort two interesting discoveries had already rewarded it. Again and again we had come between the high dunes upon patches covered with minute but easily recognizable fragments of rock flakes of the wind-eroded hill range once extending right through to the Khotan River. Elsewhere, fully 30 miles from the nearest traceable bed of the Yarkand River, a small belt of eroded ground displayed on its surface abundant remains of the Stone Age, proving occupation by a Palæolithic settlement of what is now absolutely lifeless desert. Xeolithic arrow-heads turned up on similar ground nearer to Chok-tagh.
After crossing the Yarkand River behind that hill chain we fortunately secured ponies from a grazing-ground, and were thus enabled to push on rapidly through hitherto unsurveyed tracts of riverine jungle, largely dead, to where, near Gorachöl, the last dried-up offshoots of the Kashgardarya bed lose thenuselves. Thence, with fresh animals, we gained
