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Cave Poem
“When Spring passes, again comes Autumn.
The people come and go all the time.
The moon and the sun are always there.
The mountains and the rivers are always there,
And the water flows forever.”
This is a poem one of our group found in one of the caves at DunHuang, which we visited next. It is an onthe-spot translation inscribed by a donor of the paintings in one of the 1,000 grottoes dug into the mountains at the largest Chinese Buddhist monastery constructed over a period of a thousand years. It is a museum of Chinese painting and sculpture begun in the third centuary A.D.
We traveled three hours on the bus across desert to reach Dunhuang. At first it was a gravely surface, coming out of mountaps and sustaining little growth. After 70 kilometers, we crossed a river near which we stopped to look at camels grazing and to talk to their herders. The earth began to appear dark and full of organic matter - swamp land. Salt or alkali had in many places precipitated to the surface, forming a white crust, but more vegetation grew! I collected two kinds of camel grass, a succulent with a thin steam, a rough grass, and the rather hairy foliage of a bush that may be similar to sage brush. Another bush had small leaves along a stem and yellow flowers. Later, we learned that this plant is collected and used as fertilizer. I noticed one evening that its leaves fold up at night. This dense earth continued another 70 kilometers into Dunhuang. an oasis.
Facing the hills into which the caves are carved (at several elevations, reaching as high as an eight story building,) at some distance is a dramatic mountain range which at that point turns rather sharply from running north and south to east and west. We had beautiful views' of this range as we went in
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