782 
THROUGH ASIA 
lips in sand. But a pious man, who venerated the image 
of Buddha, conveyed food to him in secret. When the 
rahan went his ways, he said to the pious man who had 
saved his life, “ Within seven days there shall come a 
rain of sand and earth, and it shall wholly bury this city, 
so that every man within it shall die, save thou only.” 
Thereupon the rahan disappeared, and the pious man 
went and warned his kinsmen ; but they all laughed him 
to scorn. Then he went and hid himself in a cave ; 
and on the seventh day after midnight there fell a rain 
of sand, which buried the whole city. After that the 
pious man crept out of the cave, and went to Pi-ma ; 
but he was hardly come there, when the image of Buddha 
transported itself thither after him. 
As an instructive parallel to the legends which are in 
circulation at the present day about the buried cities 
of the Takla-makan Desert, I will cite a passage 
descriptive of the unhappy city of Ho-lao-lo-kia. “It 
is now nothinof more than an extensive mound of sand. 
Several princes from other lands have often desired to 
dig out the site, and carry off the precious treasures and 
other objects which lie buried there. But every time 
they try to dig the sand away, a violent wind arises, 
setting up whirlwinds of smoke and a thick mist, which 
sweep away the path, and lead the workmen astray into 
the desert.” 
A man in Khotan told me that once he found a buried 
city in the desert, and in the houses there were dead 
bodies of people in positions which seemed to prove that 
they had been overtaken by death suddenly, being em- 
bedded in the sand in the same manner as the inhabitants 
of Pompeii were smothered in ashes. Strangely enough, 
the belief is generally current in all that region, that the 
city was sanded up by a single sudden catastrophe — a 
sort of revolutionary natural occurrence. 
Now these legfends and chronicle stories are not mere 
dreams or creations of fancy. They rest upon an actual 
substratum of truth ; for in the Takla-makan Desert (as 
I shall presently relate) I shortly afterwards discovered 
