BURIED CITY OF TAKLA-MAKAN 8oi 
When did the sour green leaves of it’s poplars yellow for 
their last fall ? When was the trickling hum of its mill- 
wheels silenced for ever ? When did its despairing people 
finally abandon their dwellings to the ravenous maw of 
the desert king ? Who were the people who lived here ? 
What was the tongue they spoke ? Whence came the 
unknown inhabitants of this Tadmor in the wilderness ? 
How long did their city flourish, and whither did they go, 
when they saw that within its walls they could no longer 
have a safe abiding-place? 
These are questions which I cannot definitely answer 
now. I can only refer to what I have said above in 
the chapter on the History of Khotan ; reserving a full 
discussion of the many difficult and interesting questions 
arising out of my discoveries there for some future 
occasion. 
This city of Takla-makan, for that is the name my 
guides gave to it — we will retain the name, for it is instinct 
with a wealth of mysterious secrets, of puzzling problems, 
which it is reserved for future inquiry to solve — this city, 
of whose existence no European had hitherto any inkling, 
was one of the most unexpected discoveries that I made 
throughout the whole of my travels in Asia. Who could 
have imagined, that in the interior of the dread Desert 
of Gobi, and precisely in that part of it which in dreari- 
ness and desolation exceeds all other deserts on the face 
of the earth, actual cities slumbered under the sand, cities 
wind-driven for thousands of years, the ruined survivals of 
a once flourishing civilization ? And yet there stood I 
amid the wreck and devastation of an ancient people, 
within whose dwellings none had ever entered save the 
sandstorm in its days of maddest revelry ; there stood I 
like the prince in the enchanted wood, having awakened 
to new life the city which had slumbered for a thousand 
years, or at any rate rescued the memory of its existence 
from oblivion. 
However these questions may be finally answered, one 
thing comes out as unquestionably true. Such highly 
developed artistic feeling as is evinced in the pictures 
