łThus I had the grief of discovering in the Manichaean shrine K a
library which was utterly destroyed by water. When I had unearthed the door
from the heaped-up loess dust and sand we found on the threshold the dried-up
corpse of a murdered Buddhist monk, his ritual robes all stained with blood.
The whole room, into which this door led, was covered to a depth of about two
feet with a mass of what, on closer inspection, proved to be remains of
Manichaean manuscripts. The loess water had penetrated the papers, stuck
everything together, and in the terrible heat of the usual summer there, all
these valuable books had turned into loess. I took specimens of them and dried
them carefully in the hope of saving some of these manuscripts; but the
separate pages crumbled off and dropped into small fragments, on which the
remains of beautifully written lines, intermingled with traces of miniatures
executed in gold, blue, red, green, and yellow, were still to be seen. An
enormous treasure has been lost here...˛
Albert von Le Coq, Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, Toronto, 1985, p. 61