Aeolian means wind, from the Greek word aeolus - wind. The aeolian city is a city created by the forces, the work of the wind. And the reader has the right to ask: how can the wind create a city?
A city is a collection of buildings of various shapes, sizes and purposes, located on the sides of streets, lanes, squares, gardens and parks, often decorated with monuments in honor of remarkable people or events. The city is built by man from various materials for the joint life of many people in a confined space. In the aeolian city, the creative art of man is completely replaced by the forces of nature - the work of the wind, which is helped by heat and frost, drops of rain and trickles of water, using the peculiarities of the composition, structure and conditions of occurrence rocks and as a result, creating forms more or less similar to human structures. We find such forms, created by the forces of nature, quite often.
In the mountains, there are individual cliffs that look like towers, sometimes even whole castles. On the ridges of mountains and hills, especially in deserts, where the aeolus reaches the greatest strength and works more often and longer, sometimes we find rocks very similar to pillars, tables, needles, mushrooms, pyramids, balls, attracting the attention of the traveler with their shape and causing surprise with their resemblance with works of human hands. In addition to all such forms that can be called positive, the forces of nature also create negative ones: in the form of depressions of various sizes - from small cells that make the surface of a cliff look like a honeycomb, to large niches in which a person can sit or stand, sometimes connected deep one against the other and representing galleries with windows separated by columns.
Sometimes there are many of these homogeneous positive or negative forms in the same area. But only as a rare exception can one find a collection of various aeolian forms in such a quantity and such quality that an idea of an eolian city could arise - a whole city created by the work of the aeolian and his assistants.
During my travels in Europe, North, Central and Central Asia, I have seen many different aeolian forms. In the literature describing the deserts of Iran, Arabia, Sahara, Australia and the so-called "bad lands" of the central states North America, various aeolian forms are mentioned and depicted in photographs quite often. But nowhere in nature and in descriptions did I find such a combination of forms of various nature in such a quantity and on such a large area that an idea of an Aeolian city could arise, with the exception of the one described below.
This aeolian city is located in the Chinese Dzungaria, on the banks of the Dam River. Dzungaria is northern part Xinjiang Province of the Republic of China, located between mountain systems Eastern Tien Shan in the south, Mongolian Altai in the north and Dzungarian Alatau in the west. On three sides, the vast Dzungaria depression is limited by these high mountain ranges, but in one place, in the northwestern corner, these mountains are significantly understood and thinned out; here, in the interval between the Dzhungar Alatau and the Mongolian Altai, from the steppe, which was called the Kirghiz steppe there (now it became part of the Kazakh SSR), the less high chains of Tarbagatai and Saura are being introduced into Dzungaria quite far. The ridges Barlyk, Urkashar and Semistay adjoin them from the south; A little to the south is the Maili-Dzhair chain, which constitutes the continuation of the Dzungar Alatau to the east, separated from the latter by a deep valley called the Dzhungar gate. These mountain ranges are separated from one another by more or less wide valleys, along which one can drive from the Soviet Union to the Republic of China without overcoming any high passes, steep ascents and descents. Small areas of the desert are found only in places.
This northwestern corner of the Chinese Dzungaria, directly adjacent to the border of Kazakhstan, I called the Border Dzungaria and studied it for three years to find out geological structure this interval between the mountain systems of Altai and Tien Shan. It should be noted that this country, despite its proximity to our border and easy accessibility, remained very poorly studied before my work, although the expeditions of Przhevalsky, Pevtsov, Kozlov and Roborovsky passed through it on the way to Central Asia or back, but they did not there was time for a more detailed study of this country, because on the way to Central Asia they were attracted by more distant and interesting tasks in Tibet, Nanshan, Kunlun, and on the way back, the researchers were already tired of many months of work and were in a hurry to return to their homeland. Therefore, in both cases, Border Dzungaria received only passing observations.
I discovered the aeolian city at the end of the second summer of exploration of the Border Dzungaria. This time student M.A. Usov and my son Sergei. We have already explored the Jair mountain range, where we saw the gold mines abandoned since the middle of the last century, crossed the Semistay rocky ridge twice and left it along the Kobuk river gorge into the Syrkhyngobi desert, which had to be passed on the way to the lower reaches of the Dam River. Among this desert, two low mountain ranges stretch from east to west - Khara-sirkhe and Khara-arat. The passage from the Kobuk River led us to the eastern end of the first chain, where we spent the night at a small spring, among the picturesque rocky hills made of inclined layers of the Jurassic coal-bearing suite; on the top of some of the hills, the cover of the transgressive conglomerate of the Tertiary or Quaternary is still preserved. It would be interesting to examine these hills in more detail, but the source provided so little water that we could not fill our caravan with water and had to move on. There was a long waterless passage to the lower reaches of the Dam River, and it was necessary to hurry.
We walked for a long time along the foothill plain of this Hara-sirkhe chain, slowly descending to a dry channel at the northern foot of the Hara-arat chain. This plain was a wormwood steppe, furrowed with dry channels, along which, during the rains, streams of water flowed down from the mountains, depositing sand and silt, composing the entire plain. In Central Asia, such foothill plains, consisting of loose material carried by temporary streams from the mountains, often form a very wide and high pedestal, above which rocky slopes rise sharply. mountain range who gave the material for this pedestal. The Mongols call these foothill plains "bel".
The sun was already sinking when we passed the dry bed at the foot of the Khara-arat and entered this chain of low black hills, completely covered with rubble and debris of weathered rocks and almost devoid of any vegetation. We drove for a long time along these dull hills and finally got to the southern slope of the chain, where the terrain had a completely different look, which amazed us with its originality. You might have thought that we were in the ruins of some ancient city... We drove as if through streets lined with massive buildings of the Asian type, with cornices and columns, but no windows. In the walls of buildings, balls were often visible, completely similar to the round cannonballs of ancient cannons, which were stuck in the walls of houses during the bombing of the city. Small and large transparent plates, like shards of window glass, glittered in places on the soil of the streets and at the foot of the walls. But there was no time to stop to inspect these strange shapes. The sun had already set, and the guide was in a hurry, declaring that the water was still far away. I had to postpone the inspection until another time.
Finally, the road emerged from these ruins, and we found ourselves among low sandy hills, overgrown with tamarisk bushes, so similar to one another that one could get lost in them. It got dark. And the conductor stated:
We need to stop: we will lose the road in the dark.
We stopped among these hills, unloaded the animals. We had water for people with us in barrels, tamarisk bushes provided material for fire, and we could brew tea for ourselves. They did not set up tents, they slept, without undressing, among their belongings.
As soon as dawn broke, we got up and walked on. The sandy hills soon ended, and the trail stretched across a large salt marsh with swampy soil. At night, of course, we would have lost the trail and could suffer all night with pack animals stuck in the mud. To the left of the salt marsh one could see the continuation of the strange ruins in the form of a high square tower, in front of which lay a figure that looked like an Egyptian sphinx.
The valley of the Dam River began behind the salt marsh. Tall grass, abundant bushes, groves of trees suggested that there should be water. In the first grove we saw a well and decided to stop so that the animals, which had spent the whole night without water and food, could rest. We got loose, set up tents, took out a bucket and a rope to water the animals. The well was three meters deep. We scooped up some water. It turned out to be very dirty and smelled strongly of rotten eggs. Even the undemanding donkeys of our caravan did not want to drink it. But the guide said confidently:
This is a Kalmyk well. They live here in winter, and go to the mountains in the summer. Water from the well had not been taken for a long time, and it died out. Let's clean the well and the water will be good!
The guide's son, who served as our laborer, undressed and went down into the well with a bucket and a spade. Thirty buckets of black mud and rotten water were pulled out of the well. Then they gathered fresh, they drew it out for the watering place of the animals that drank it; she was still unclear and smelled a little. But the next portion got better, and we could use it - in Central Asia we have to be content with slightly brackish or odorous water.
We lived in this grove for several days. In the morning I left with both employees to explore the aeolian city, take pictures, photographs. By three or four o'clock they returned and in the evening recorded observations, drew the survey, changed photographic plates. In the last summer of research in Border Dzungaria, I managed to visit again here and again spend several days in the same grove in order to supplement the survey of this tract, called Orhu.
The aeolian city covers an area of several tens of square kilometers south of the Khara-arat mountain range and east of the lower reaches of the Dam River. This entire area is composed of relatively loose sandstones and sandy clays of yellow, pink and greenish colors, which are easily eroded and dispelled. In the thickness of these rocks there are harder layers and quite a lot of hard calcareous nodules, that is, concretions rich in lime, in the form of regular balls of different diameters, as well as the most bizarre shapes... With the weathering of rocks, hard interlayers appear as cornices and, together with nodules, determine the formation of the most various forms relief. The veins of white transparent gypsum, present in the thickness, fall out in the form of fragments, similar to window glass. Such qualities of the composition of this stratum of bedrock, lying almost horizontally on large area, determined the variety and whimsical forms of weathering and dispelling that characterize this area.
According to the features of the relief, we have divided the aeolian city into three parts. The first, occupying the largest area and closest to the valley of the Dam River, is separated from the last by flat hills, behind which are visible from the valley the towers and pillars of the city rising above. Here streets and lanes of different lengths and widths replace one another, in some places - squares furnished with massive walls 2-3 floors high, with cornices, with round nuclei sticking out in the walls, towers - round and square - of different sizes, pyramids, pillars, needles , figures separately and in groups.
A sharp needle, several meters in height, rises above the building. Here are two towers, one higher, the other lower, in the lower part connected to a common building. Here is a thin pillar, crowned with a nodule, similar to the head of a lizard, rising above the body, resembling in general the figure of a fossil dinosaur. Here is a secluded tower, wide below, tapering upward into something that looks like a head in a bonnet, and in general - the figure of a woman in a wide dress kneeling. Here is a bust of a man in a helmet. Here is a group of round towers of various sizes. Here is a tower, and next to it is the figure of a sphinx on a high pedestal.
One street brought us to open space the outskirts of this part of the city, where among the rare trees of saxaul rose as if recumbent figures of animals on pedestals, resembling grave mausoleums or sarcophagi - in general, a suburban cemetery, and nearby a low tower, similar to a chapel. Streets and alleys of the city for the most part devoid of any vegetation. Their soil is clay sand, washed away and blown away from buildings: a leg sinks into it above the ankle, breaking through a thin upper clay crust. Deep footprints remain everywhere behind us, indicating where we drove. But in some places the soil of the streets is a dry salt marsh with bumps overgrown with bushes of hodgepodge. There are also streets with sandy hills covered with tamarisk bushes. In the northeast, this part of the city ends in a vast sandy area, strewn with small pebbles and rubble, polished with sand. Rises higher, as if on a flat hill, East End city, facing the square with a continuous row of buildings with cornices, ledges, columns, reminiscent of a fairytale palace. And in front of it, completely apart, rises an array of forty meters in height, with steep sides, similar to a prison castle and received from us the name "Bastille". On the rise to this elevated part of the city, to the left of the palace, we saw towers of various shapes, fences, like low stone walls with turrets, and in one place - a figure surprisingly similar to a man in an armchair, but without the head and the upper part of the bust.
The southern part of the city, seen on the second visit, consists of a series of tall, clumsy reddish towers with cornices. Streets covered with sand dunes rise to them. We did not have to get behind these towers, and the lower part of the city, which had not yet been examined, remained there. In front of the towers there are low mounds of a different kind, due to the fact that the same formation of rocks here is crossed by numerous veins of black shiny asphalt of a special kind, falling almost vertically. These veins, with a thickness of 2-3 centimeters to a meter, led to the formation of other forms of relief. When weathered, the asphalt disintegrates into small pieces that cover the hillsides with a thick black rash. The veins themselves and the rocks crossed by them, capped, that is, saturated with oil, solidified in the veins in the asphalt, are harder and make up sharp ridges of hills. Hard, capped sandstones of the sides of the veins in places protrude on the ridges with large slabs or thick beams 2-3 meters long; in some places they form small gorges of individual slabs. The discovery of these veins (we counted more than ten of them), which created the special forms of this part of the city, was also of practical importance, proving that there must be an oil field in the depths.
The aeolian city amazed us with its desolation, the absence of signs of life. Nearby, in the valley of the Dam River, there were groves, bushes, grass, insects, birds, hares, antelopes, and in the city there was almost no vegetation, bare buildings, towers, streets, lanes, squares. Driving along them, we only occasionally saw insects carried by the wind. Dead silence reigned here; the stuffiness of the air, heated by the rays of the sun, reflected by the walls of buildings, was only occasionally refreshed by light gusts of wind that created small tornadoes that whirled through the streets and squares.
One day we experienced a sandstorm. We had already returned from our city tour to our grove and were sitting near the tent in the shade of a poplar when the wind, weak in the morning, intensified and a cloud of dust approached from the north-west, hiding the sun. Over the city, the air turned gray, large swirling columns of dust appeared, which the wind lifted from the streets and squares, blew off the walls. Soon everything disappeared into a cloud of dust. But the storm ended with a few drops of rain, and by evening the sky cleared.
Despite the complete bareness of the forms of the city, their change occurs very slowly. I was able to verify this by taking two photographs of the same two pillars at intervals of three years. One pillar was thick, squat, inclined to one side, the other was thin, straight, two meters high. Comparison of the photographs showed that over three years the shapes have not changed in any significant way. Therefore, one can think that the aeolian city was created by the forces of the aeolian and his assistants over the course of several centuries. It is possible that at first, when the climate of Dzungaria was wetter than at present, the main role in the dissection of the sedimentary rocks that make up the city was played by running water, which cut numerous ravines, which later gradually turned into streets and alleys.
The discovery of the aeolian city is one of the proofs of the very poor knowledge of the Border Dzungaria before my research. At the end of 1890, Pevtsov's expedition, returning from Tibet, traveled along the lower course of the Dam River; it included a young geologist. From the river valley, the needles and pillars of the nearest part of the city are visible, rising above the tops of the front hills. The geologist could not help noticing them from his path, but he was not curious to turn to them for inspection. Moreover, the expedition spent the night on the shore of the Ulyungur lake, adjacent to the city square from the west, and buildings that attract attention are visible from the shore of the lake; from the parking lot it was possible to go to them. The excuse for the geologist is that the expedition returned tired to its homeland and passed here in winter, during severe frosts. We also spent the night on the shores of this lake after the second visit to the city, but the lake itself was not there, it has completely dried up over the past 19 years. The bottom of the lake was a bare sandy plain, but along the banks of the former small bays, the remains of reed thickets still stretched, completely dried up, having lost their panicles and leaves. I set one such thicket on fire and photographed the view of the fire, having driven off along the bottom of the lake for some distance.
The emergence of this extremely rare combination of aeolian forms in the Border Dzungaria can be explained by a number of favorable conditions: a dry desert climate with strong winds; strata of loose, easily dispersed rocks of significant thickness and in horizontal bedding over a large area; the presence of separate solid layers and, in particular, nodules of various sizes and shapes, which resist weathering much longer than the host rocks.
I hope that the aeolian city will once again attract the attention of researchers in the future to study the calcareous nodules in these rocks. Such nodules are often due to the presence of some kind of organic body buried in sedimentary rock at the bottom of the sea or lake: a shell of a mollusk, a bone of a vertebrate animal, the body of a fish, crayfish, sponge, lily, which were buried in silt, cause an influx of lime solution deposited around this foreign body. Many nodules turned out to contain interesting fossils, for example, nodules in the red sandstones of the banks of the Northern Dvina, in which Professor Amalitsky mined a mass of bones of Permian reptiles that adorn Paleontological Museum Academy of Sciences. It is possible that the nodules in the rocks of the aeolian city also contain some kind of organic remains, which will make it possible to determine the age of the sequence. We were able to find in it only prints of bivalve freshwater shells and a few small bones that could not be identified; and the age of the strata of the aeolian city, we quite conditionally, according to other signs, we consider Cretaceous. But it can be Tertiary or even much more ancient - Jurassic. In the Borderline Dzungaria, in the valleys between the chains, Jurassic coal-bearing layers with good flora are often found, but there are also Tertiary deposits. The study of the aeolian city by a special expedition, equipped with the means and forces for the extraction and processing of nodules, can give interesting results.
The city, created by nature, is located in the vicinity of the Kug aul of the Khiva region of Dagestan. It represents outliers in the form of towers, pillars, mushrooms and arches.
"Aeolian city" is located on the southern slope of one of the spurs of the Karasyrt ridge, which separates the intramontane Dagestan from the foothill in the upper reaches of the Korchagsu River, in the vicinity of the Kug aul. On an area of almost 3 kilometers, on a relatively flat area with dense rugged bushes and trees, there are original-shaped outliers in the form of towers, pillars, arches of various types, stone mushrooms of the most bizarre shape. All these reliefs are the result of the work of wind and water, therefore they are called aeolian (named after Aeolus - the god of winds of ancient Greek mythology).
Two pillar-shaped outliers attract the most attention. They are located close to each other and, towering above the forest thickets, are clearly visible from the village of Kug. One pole can be climbed without any equipment, its height is about ten meters. The top of this pillar is flat, and the walls of the formation are covered with juniper and barberry. The second pillar is similar to a cylinder and reaches a height of seventeen meters.
The originality of the area gave rise to many legends and beliefs among the local population about the origin of this interesting corner nature. In the past, at the top of one of the outliers, residents performed religious rituals, made sacrifices to evil spirits in order to get rid of natural disasters and ailments. Some bizarre landforms seemed to superstitious people to be traces of fantastic animals, and the whole area was considered a gathering place for unclean spirits. Even today, some residents of the Kug aul call this area a "sacred forest", attributing the most fantastic properties to it.
There are many caves on the territory of the "Aeolian City", the most round of them is located in its eastern part. A survey of the karst topography of this area in recent years has shown that there are more than 10 interconnected caves. On summer days, when the air on the surface of the plateau warms up to 25-30 degrees, the temperature in the caves does not rise above 10-12 degrees. Local residents harvest ice in winter and store it here almost all summer.
The caves are the most popular among tourists. All of them arose as a result of exposure to wind and water. There are a lot of labyrinths in the main cave, so it is better to go there with an experienced guide. The "Aeolian City" is very popular among travelers who prefer to relax in the bosom of nature.
Location: on the southern slope of one of the spurs of the Karasyrt ridge, in the upper reaches of the Korchagsu River, in the Khiva region, not far from the village of Kug.
Aeolian means wind, from the Greek word aeolus - wind. The aeolian city is a city created by the forces, the work of the wind. And the reader has the right to ask: how can the wind create a city?
A city is a collection of buildings of various shapes, sizes and purposes, located on the sides of streets, lanes, squares, gardens and parks, often decorated with monuments in honor of remarkable people or events. The city is built by man from various materials for the joint life of many people in a confined space. In the aeolian city, the creative art of man is completely replaced by the forces of nature - the work of the wind, which is helped by heat and frost, drops of rain and streams of water, using the peculiarities of the composition, structure and conditions of the occurrence of rocks and, as a result, creating forms that are more or less similar to human structures. We find such forms, created by the forces of nature, quite often.
In the mountains, there are individual cliffs that look like towers, sometimes even whole castles. On the ridges of mountains and hills, especially in deserts, where the aeolus reaches the greatest strength and works more often and longer, sometimes we find rocks very similar to pillars, tables, needles, mushrooms, pyramids, balls, attracting the attention of the traveler with their shape and causing surprise with their resemblance with works of human hands. In addition to all such forms that can be called positive, the forces of nature also create negative ones: in the form of depressions of various sizes - from small cells that make the surface of a cliff look like a honeycomb, to large niches in which a person can sit or stand, sometimes connected deep one against the other and representing galleries with windows separated by columns.
Sometimes there are many of these homogeneous positive or negative forms in the same area. But only as a rare exception can one find a collection of various aeolian forms in such a quantity and such quality that an idea of an eolian city could arise - a whole city created by the work of the aeolian and his assistants.
During my travels in Europe, North, Central and Central Asia, I have seen many different aeolian forms. In the literature describing the deserts of Iran, Arabia, Sahara, Australia and the so-called “bad lands” of the central states of North America, various aeolian forms are mentioned and depicted in photographs quite often. But nowhere in nature and in descriptions did I find such a combination of forms of various nature in such a quantity and on such a large area that an idea of an Aeolian city could arise, with the exception of the one described below.
This aeolian city is located in the Chinese Dzungaria, on the banks of the Dam River. Dzungaria is the northern part of the Xinjiang province of the Republic of China, located between the mountain systems of the Eastern Tien Shan in the south, the Mongolian Altai in the north and the Dzungar Alatau in the west. On three sides, the vast Dzungaria depression is limited by these high mountain ranges, but in one place, in the northwestern corner, these mountains are significantly understood and thinned out; here, in the interval between the Dzhungar Alatau and the Mongolian Altai, from the steppe, which was called the Kirghiz steppe there (now it became part of the Kazakh SSR), the less high chains of Tarbagatai and Saura are being introduced into Dzungaria quite far. The ridges Barlyk, Urkashar and Semistay adjoin them from the south; A little to the south is the Maili-Dzhair chain, which constitutes the continuation of the Dzungar Alatau to the east, separated from the latter by a deep valley called the Dzhungar gate. These mountain ranges are separated from one another by more or less wide valleys, along which one can drive from the Soviet Union to the Republic of China, without overcoming any high passes, steep ascents and descents. Small areas of the desert are found only in places.
This northwestern corner of the Chinese Dzungaria, directly adjacent to the border of Kazakhstan, I called the Border Dzungaria and studied it for three years in order to find out the geological structure of this gap between the mountain systems of Altai and Tien Shan. It should be noted that this country, despite its proximity to our border and easy accessibility, remained very poorly studied before my work, although the expeditions of Przhevalsky, Pevtsov, Kozlov and Roborovsky passed through it on the way to Central Asia or back, but they did not there was time for a more detailed study of this country, because on the way to Central Asia they were attracted by more distant and interesting tasks in Tibet, Nanshan, Kunlun, and on the way back, the researchers were already tired of many months of work and were in a hurry to return to their homeland. Therefore, in both cases, Border Dzungaria received only passing observations.
I discovered the aeolian city at the end of the second summer of exploration of the Border Dzungaria. This time student M.A. Usov and my son Sergei. We have already explored the Jair mountain range, where we saw the gold mines abandoned since the middle of the last century, crossed the Semistay rocky ridge twice and left it along the Kobuk river gorge into the Syrkhyngobi desert, which had to be passed on the way to the lower reaches of the Dam River. Among this desert, two low mountain ranges stretch from east to west - Khara-sirkhe and Khara-arat. The passage from the Kobuk River led us to the eastern end of the first chain, where we spent the night at a small spring, among the picturesque rocky hills made of inclined layers of the Jurassic coal-bearing suite; on the top of some of the hills, the cover of the transgressive conglomerate of the Tertiary or Quaternary is still preserved. It would be interesting to examine these hills in more detail, but the source provided so little water that we could not fill our caravan with water and had to move on. There was a long waterless passage to the lower reaches of the Dam River, and it was necessary to hurry.
We walked for a long time along the foothill plain of this Hara-sirkhe chain, slowly descending to a dry channel at the northern foot of the Hara-arat chain. This plain was a wormwood steppe, furrowed with dry channels, along which, during the rains, streams of water flowed down from the mountains, depositing sand and silt, composing the entire plain. In Central Asia, such foothill plains, consisting of loose material carried by temporary streams from the mountains, often form a very wide and high pedestal, above which the rocky slopes of the mountain range rise sharply, which provided the material for this pedestal. The Mongols call these foothill plains "bel".
The sun was already sinking when we passed the dry bed at the foot of the Khara-arat and entered this chain of low black hills, completely covered with rubble and debris of weathered rocks and almost devoid of any vegetation. We drove for a long time along these dull hills and finally got to the southern slope of the chain, where the terrain had a completely different look, which amazed us with its originality. You might have thought that we were in the ruins of some ancient city. We drove as if through streets lined with massive buildings of the Asian type, with cornices and columns, but no windows. In the walls of buildings, balls were often visible, completely similar to the round cannonballs of ancient cannons, which were stuck in the walls of houses during the bombing of the city. Small and large transparent plates, like shards of window glass, glittered in places on the soil of the streets and at the foot of the walls. But there was no time to stop to inspect these strange shapes. The sun had already set, and the guide was in a hurry, declaring that the water was still far away. I had to postpone the inspection until another time.
Finally, the road emerged from these ruins, and we found ourselves among low sandy hills, overgrown with tamarisk bushes, so similar to one another that one could get lost in them. It got dark. And the conductor stated:
We need to stop: we will lose the road in the dark.
We stopped among these hills, unloaded the animals. We had water for people with us in barrels, tamarisk bushes provided material for fire, and we could brew tea for ourselves. They did not set up tents, they slept, without undressing, among their belongings.
As soon as dawn broke, we got up and walked on. The sandy hills soon ended, and the trail stretched across a large salt marsh with swampy soil. At night, of course, we would have lost the trail and could suffer all night with pack animals stuck in the mud. To the left of the salt marsh one could see the continuation of the strange ruins in the form of a high square tower, in front of which lay a figure that looked like an Egyptian sphinx.
The valley of the Dam River began behind the salt marsh. Tall grass, abundant bushes, groves of trees suggested that there should be water. In the first grove we saw a well and decided to stop so that the animals, which had spent the whole night without water and food, could rest. We got loose, set up tents, took out a bucket and a rope to water the animals. The well was three meters deep. We scooped up some water. It turned out to be very dirty and smelled strongly of rotten eggs. Even the undemanding donkeys of our caravan did not want to drink it. But the guide said confidently:
This is a Kalmyk well. They live here in winter, and go to the mountains in the summer. Water from the well had not been taken for a long time, and it died out. Let's clean the well and the water will be good!
The guide's son, who served as our laborer, undressed and went down into the well with a bucket and a spade. Thirty buckets of black mud and rotten water were pulled out of the well. Then they gathered fresh, they drew it out for the watering place of the animals that drank it; she was still unclear and smelled a little. But the next portion got better, and we could use it - in Central Asia we have to be content with slightly brackish or odorous water.
We lived in this grove for several days. In the morning I left with both employees to explore the aeolian city, take pictures, photographs. By three or four o'clock they returned and in the evening recorded observations, drew the survey, changed photographic plates. In the last summer of research in Border Dzungaria, I managed to visit again here and again spend several days in the same grove in order to supplement the survey of this tract, called Orhu.
The aeolian city covers an area of several tens of square kilometers south of the Khara-arat mountain range and east of the lower reaches of the Dam River. This entire area is composed of relatively loose sandstones and sandy clays of yellow, pink and greenish colors, which are easily eroded and dispelled. In the thickness of these rocks there are harder layers and quite a lot of hard calcareous nodules, that is, concretions rich in lime, in the form of regular balls of different diameters, as well as the most bizarre shapes. With the weathering of rocks, hard interlayers appear as cornices and, together with nodules, determine the formation of a wide variety of relief forms. The veins of white transparent gypsum, present in the thickness, fall out in the form of fragments, similar to window glass. Such qualities of the composition of this stratum of bedrock, lying almost horizontally over a large area, determined the variety and whimsical forms of weathering and scattering that characterize this area.
According to the features of the relief, we have divided the aeolian city into three parts. The first, occupying the largest area and closest to the valley of the Dam River, is separated from the last by flat hills, behind which are visible from the valley the towers and pillars of the city rising above. Here streets and lanes of different lengths and widths replace one another, in some places - squares furnished with massive walls 2-3 floors high, with cornices, with round nuclei sticking out in the walls, towers - round and square - of different sizes, pyramids, pillars, needles , figures separately and in groups.
A sharp needle, several meters in height, rises above the building. Here are two towers, one higher, the other lower, in the lower part connected to a common building. Here is a thin pillar, crowned with a nodule, similar to the head of a lizard, rising above the body, resembling in general the figure of a fossil dinosaur. Here is a secluded tower, wide below, tapering upward into something that looks like a head in a bonnet, and in general - the figure of a woman in a wide dress, kneeling. Here is a bust of a man in a helmet. Here is a group of round towers of various sizes. Here is a tower, and next to it is the figure of a sphinx on a high pedestal.
One street led us to an open place on the outskirts of this part of the city, where among the rare trees of the saxaul rose as if recumbent figures of animals on pedestals, resembling tombstones or sarcophagi - in general, a suburban cemetery, and nearby a low tower, similar to a chapel. The streets and alleys of the city are mostly devoid of any vegetation. Their soil is clay sand, washed away and blown from buildings: a leg sinks into it above the ankle, breaking through a thin upper clay crust. Deep footprints remain everywhere behind us, indicating where we drove. But in some places the soil of the streets is a dry salt marsh with bumps overgrown with bushes of hodgepodge. There are also streets with sandy hills covered with tamarisk bushes. In the northeast, this part of the city ends in a vast sandy area, strewn with small pebbles and rubble, polished with sand. Higher rises, as if on a flat hill, the eastern part of the city, facing the square with a continuous row of buildings with cornices, ledges, columns, reminiscent of a fairytale palace. And in front of it, completely apart, rises an array of forty meters in height, with steep sides, similar to a prison castle and received from us the name "Bastille". On the rise to this elevated part of the city, to the left of the palace, we saw towers of various shapes, fences, like low stone walls with turrets, and in one place - a figure surprisingly similar to a man in an armchair, but without a head and the upper part of a bust.
The southern part of the city, seen on the second visit, consists of a series of tall, clumsy reddish towers with cornices. Streets covered with sand dunes rise to them. We did not have to get behind these towers, and the lower part of the city, which had not yet been examined, remained there. In front of the towers there are low mounds of a different kind, due to the fact that the same formation of rocks here is crossed by numerous veins of black shiny asphalt of a special kind, falling almost vertically. These veins, with a thickness of 2-3 centimeters to a meter, led to the formation of other forms of relief. When weathered, the asphalt disintegrates into small pieces that cover the hillsides with a thick black rash. The veins themselves and the rocks crossed by them, capped, that is, saturated with oil, solidified in the veins in the asphalt, are harder and make up sharp ridges of hills. Hard, capped sandstones of the sides of the veins in places protrude on the ridges with large slabs or thick beams 2-3 meters long; in some places they form small gorges of individual slabs. The discovery of these veins (we counted more than ten of them), which created the special forms of this part of the city, was also of practical importance, proving that there must be an oil field in the depths.
The aeolian city amazed us with its desolation, the absence of signs of life. Nearby, in the valley of the Dam River, there were groves, bushes, grass, insects, birds, hares, antelopes, and in the city there was almost no vegetation, bare buildings, towers, streets, lanes, squares. Driving along them, we only occasionally saw insects carried by the wind. Dead silence reigned here; the stuffiness of the air, heated by the rays of the sun, reflected by the walls of buildings, was only occasionally refreshed by light gusts of wind that created small tornadoes that whirled through the streets and squares.
One day we experienced a sandstorm. We had already returned from our city tour to our grove and were sitting near the tent in the shade of a poplar when the wind, weak in the morning, intensified and a cloud of dust approached from the north-west, hiding the sun. Over the city, the air turned gray, large swirling columns of dust appeared, which the wind lifted from the streets and squares, blew off the walls. Soon everything disappeared into a cloud of dust. But the storm ended with a few drops of rain, and by evening the sky cleared.
Despite the complete bareness of the forms of the city, their change occurs very slowly. I was able to verify this by taking two photographs of the same two pillars at intervals of three years. One pillar was thick, squat, inclined to one side, the other was thin, straight, two meters high. Comparison of the photographs showed that over three years the shapes have not changed in any significant way. Therefore, one can think that the aeolian city was created by the forces of the aeolian and his assistants over the course of several centuries. It is possible that at first, when the climate of Dzungaria was wetter than at present, the main role in the dissection of the sedimentary rocks that make up the city was played by running water, which cut numerous ravines, which later gradually turned into streets and alleys.
The discovery of the aeolian city is one of the proofs of the very poor knowledge of the Border Dzungaria before my research. At the end of 1890, Pevtsov's expedition, returning from Tibet, traveled along the lower course of the Dam River; it included a young geologist. From the river valley, the needles and pillars of the nearest part of the city are visible, rising above the tops of the front hills. The geologist could not help noticing them from his path, but he was not curious to turn to them for inspection. Moreover, the expedition spent the night on the shore of the Ulyungur lake, adjacent to the city square from the west, and buildings that attract attention are visible from the shore of the lake; from the parking lot it was possible to go to them. The excuse for the geologist is that the expedition returned tired to its homeland and passed here in winter, during severe frosts. We also spent the night on the shores of this lake after the second visit to the city, but the lake itself was not there, it has completely dried up over the past 19 years. The bottom of the lake was a bare sandy plain, but along the banks of the former small bays, the remains of reed thickets still stretched, completely dried up, having lost their panicles and leaves. I set one such thicket on fire and photographed the view of the fire, having driven off along the bottom of the lake for some distance.
The emergence of this extremely rare combination of aeolian forms in the Border Dzungaria can be explained by a number of favorable conditions: a dry desert climate with strong winds; strata of loose, easily dispersed rocks of significant thickness and in horizontal bedding over a large area; the presence of separate solid layers and, in particular, nodules of various sizes and shapes, which resist weathering much longer than the host rocks.
I hope that the aeolian city will once again attract the attention of researchers in the future to study the calcareous nodules in these rocks. Such nodules are often due to the presence of some kind of organic body buried in sedimentary rock at the bottom of the sea or lake: a shell of a mollusk, a bone of a vertebrate animal, the body of a fish, crayfish, sponge, lily, which were buried in silt, cause an influx of lime solution deposited around this foreign body. Many nodules turned out to contain interesting fossils, for example, nodules in the red sandstones of the banks of the Northern Dvina, in which Professor Amalitsky mined a lot of Permian reptile bones that adorn the Paleontological Museum of the Academy of Sciences. It is possible that the nodules in the rocks of the aeolian city also contain some kind of organic remains, which will make it possible to determine the age of the sequence. We were able to find in it only prints of bivalve freshwater shells and a few small bones that could not be identified; and the age of the strata of the aeolian city, we quite conditionally, according to other signs, we consider Cretaceous. But it can be Tertiary or even much more ancient - Jurassic. In the Borderline Dzungaria, in the valleys between the chains, Jurassic coal-bearing layers with good flora are often found, but there are also Tertiary deposits. The study of the aeolian city by a special expedition, equipped with the means and forces for the extraction and processing of nodules, can give interesting results.
