Nov. 2
A report from Berlin has it that a Russian arehiwotogist has discovered at Karakhoto the tomb of Genghis Khan, According to the text the explorer's name is Krysloff, which means nothing to us and which we take to be a perversion of the name of the famous Colonel Kostoff who was; the first to discover and develop the great archaeological field at Karakhoto—which being interpreted means the Black Camp. This report gives us an excellent opportunity to get away from the over-painful subject of China's wars and other miseries.
In the first place we do not believe that there is such a person as Krysloff—though in this matter we are subject to correction—and in the second place we do not believe that Genghis Khan's burial. place! has been found, in the vicinity' of Karakhoto. Those of our readers who are interested in such matters will remember that many years ago, when Colonel /Kosloff. was still in his prime and when Sir- Aurel Stein was just [beginning to dig up the remnants of a lost Buddhist civilization in Central Asia, an adventurous French savant, M. Bonin, went} through the Ordos desert and discovered to his own satisfaction the actual burial place Genghis Khan - (we take the spelling from the Berlin report land not from the modern Mongol which is Chinghiz). M. Bonin found, as some of us have since established by actual contract, that the Ordos Mongols considered themselves the custodians lof not only the grave but the chief who rode his pon} the Kerulon to East Prus: never had a serious defeat. In the Ordos each tribe is the keeper of one particular bit of the great leader's horse furniture. One has his saddle, another Ihis spear and so forth.' Once a your they are bound by their town code to assemble at the Jgrave which is under a particularly fine yurt to bring] together the hero's kit and do reference at his grave. We do not have M. Bonin's book at hand for reference, but if we remem-
Yer rightly he saw something lof this. Knowing how tradition the East we believe sincerely that the Ordos Mongols late the curators of the only' genuine grave of the Great Khan, The writer of these lines has seen some of the hor-e furniture that figures in the} ceremony described by M. Bonin in the tents of the Ordos Chinese students of the history lof the period that immediately, preceded the Yuan Dynasty will remember that, according to their contemporary reports, Genghis Kaan died on the Liu, Shan which is in Kansu'on ih|the great highway that has led from the beginning of time from Honan into central Asia. The! lory is that when the masterier who had devastated "so much of Asia went on his lonely] way, the several tribes of his bodyguard, the close attendants of the "Urdu," took his body out into the waste places and appointed themselves the keepers of the grave forever. With us the "Urdu" became horde; on the map the particular desert] district in which the bodyguard] took up their abode is known as the Ordos. This was where M. Bonin discovered the grave of the Great Khan at a time when most of us were teething. This Soviet effort to rediscover the grave in the name ofan' unknown Kryzloff, as transmitted through Berlin, appeals to us, therefore, as one of the usual impudent attempts on Red Russia's part to lay claim to the promotion of culture and scholar-hip. That is the reason that we are making so much of what ought otherwise to be a very injeidental and possibly dull sub-Jeet.
Karakhoto is the least likely place that an amateur would select as the burial ground of the Great Khan. It is a town in country that the desert is busily burying, some little distance north of Kanchow in the extreme northwest of China near the present end of the Great Wall. In Marco Polo's time it was an important courier stage on the way to the Mongol military headquar-_ ters at Kara Kuren (otherwise Karakorum). British, American, French, German, Japanese, and other scientists have been there and have done their best. There is probably a lot, to be got out} of Karakhoto yet and if we received a bona fide report that} Colonel Kosloff, in his very old lage (he first helped to explore northern Tibet in 1871), had found something worth mention ing: at Karakhoto we should certainly. try, to, be..the first. ta
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.