Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1924-05-07

| hundreds of feet in year in the d.
rection Of the prevailing winds; the
largest scarcely move at all. The
sand is most beautiful, with it's grace
full sweep of wavy dunes and ripples
but the natives hate and fear it. II
has proved the grave of many a ma.
tive gone mad with thirst in the vain
search for the gold supposed to lie
hidden in sand-buried ruins.
| A few rivers flow into the desert Of
| Takla-Makan. Most of them soon
wither to nothing. All are very vari-
! able, and some, such as the Wash
| Sheri, flow in raging, impossible tor
rents du- ing sunny weather in sum-
mer, but dry up when cloudy days
among the mountains prevent the melt
ing Of snow The dry beds of these
"Sabbatic" streams form veritable
rivers of stones" In certain cases
one might almost say with the old
chronicler that there are streams
whose sands are mere precious
stones" When the Khotan and Keriya
rivers are low, crowds of natives go
out from the GASES to dig in the gravel
Of the river bed for jade, one Of the
most highly priced of Chinese precious
stones Gold also is found In the up
per parts of the beds of the Keriya
and other rivers.
Sea of Salt Is Marsh.
East of the Sea of Sand there lies
Sea of Salt, the bed of the ancient
Lake of Lop-Nor. Today the lake is
merely a marsh, fed by the Tarim
river, and filed with huge reeds IL
to 10 feet high. Near the mouth of
the river, where alone the water is
fresh enough to support life, the Lop-
ltks have planted their villages of
reeds Formerly, according to their
own account, they lived wholly on fish
and birds caught in the open lanes and
pools Of the swamp, where the fisher
men still paddle their canoes of hol-
lowed poplar. They cannot go far to
the east, for there the swamp grows
more and more saline, until finally it
merges into a great plain of salt, the
bed Of the expanded lake of former
times.
The old bed of Lop-Nor is one Of the
most absolute deserts in the world.
Even the hardy natives never venture
into it. For five days a caravan of
Western explorers recently stumbled
YEARLY over a sea Of rock salt broken
into huge polygonn 10 or II feet in
diameter, which had buckled up
around the edges to height of from
choppiest sort Of sea frozen solid.
When what appeared to be soft places
were selected in which to pitch tents,
the iron tent pegs bent double. For
60 miles north and south and for near
ly 200 east and west there is abso
lutely not a sign of any living thing.
1t Is relatively but a little while
since Lop-Nor was much larger than
now and expanded to such size that
most, If not all, of the old bed was
covered by water, as is proved by the
location Of ancient roads and beaches.
At the time of Christ, the lake ap-
pears to have been of large dimensions
IL
five centuries later was probably as
small or smaller than 1t now Is. Later
it expanded, and with varying fiuctua-
lions remained comparatively large
until about 1900 A. d. Now 1t has
once more diminished, and the people
who formerly were supported by it
have largely died off. A century or
two ago they used to carry fish two or
three hundred miles eastward to the
Chinese cities where HISTORIAN Chris
tians lived in the days rf Marco Polo
and earlier. Now the desert has be-
come so rigorous and the fish have so
decreased In number that the traffic
letters of Prester John was almost
right when he said that fish were pro.
cured from the Sea of Sand. They
certainly came from the border be-
tween it and the Sea of Salt
In the last few years important finds
have been made among the ruins Of
temples and cities in the edge of the
deserts of Chinese Turkestan, over
which sand has drifted. Caves, too,
have been found In cliffs trimming the
deserts, in which are deliberately
carved and decorated shrines. The
evidence so far uncovered indicates
that the people who lived In the coun-
try before the Christian era had Indo-
European languages and so are closely
connected with Europeans. The re-
Hgion of these early inhabitants was
Buddhism, but later they were con-
quered by Moslems and Mohammedan-
ism Is now dominant. The finds even
seem to Indicate that 1t may have been
from this region with its ancient thriv-
Ing civilization that the ancestors Of
the Chinese came