SEQUEL OF MY DESERT JOURNEY 929 
that point had followed up the trail of a fox, which ran due 
west into the desert. They followed it for some days, and 
at last came to a place where the animal had stopped and 
scratched in the sand. The sand there was as white as 
chalk ; they discovered that the colouring was caused by 
flour. After that they dug down, and at last came upon 
the tent, so completely buried in the sand that the tops of 
the tent-poles were a foot below the surface. Then they 
fished up the different articles one after the other, and 
loaded them on donkeys’ backs, and carried them to the 
river. 
This was a most interesting story. It proved that the 
sand-dunes round the tent had increased more than six 
feet in height ; although the increase might in great part 
be due to local irregularities, caused by the heaping up of 
the sand on the sheltered side of the tent. In the summer 
of 1 895 there had clearly been heavy gales of wind ; but 
the winter had been as usual calm and quiet, so that the 
fox’s trail had not been blotted out, and was easy to trace. 
No doubt the foxes had scented the hens and the cases of 
provisions we left behind, and had gone across the desert 
in search of them. The hunters found the skeleton of 
one of the hens on a sand-dune a long way from the 
camp ; but they saw nothing of the two dead men. 
Possibly they both crept on a little farther on the night 
of ist May. 
The aksakal quickly formed his own conclusions as to 
the truth of this story. Why did they not take the things 
straight to the amban, Liu Darin, instead of waiting until 
the spy found them out.^ Well, Togda Beg, who had for- 
merly been a yuz-bashi (captain) in the great Yakub Begs 
army, and was known to be a hard and unscrupulous man, 
and hated accordingly — he had got wind of the “find,’ and 
persuaded the hunters, who were good-hearted, harmless 
men, to keep the affair quiet, and then gradually sell some 
of the things, keeping those they could make use of them- 
selves. Hence I only recovered some of my property, 
principally such articles as the natives could find no use 
for, such as a portion of my instruments, the plane-table 
