There are no magnificently carved temples here, no opulent royal tombs. Yet today this stark series of crumbling walls, stairways and pillars on the bank of the Indus, 400 kilometres north of Karachi, Pakistan, is the focus of an international rescue operation.

The ruins, composed entirely of identical red bricks, are all that remain of Moenjodaro, one of the ancient world's greatest cities. Discovery of this 4,500-year-old city early this century was a major archaeological breakthrough, establishing the Indus Valley as one of the cradles of civilization. Only slightly younger than those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was a pioneering civilization, spreading across an area greater than both combined. It was one of the first to develop city- planning and underground drainage; it is probably here that cotton cloth was first woven.

Moenjodaro was the leading metropolis of the Indian sub-contient. The city was laid out in rectangular blocks with broad, well-paved avenues running north- south and narrower streets intersecting at right angles. Every house was connected to an elaborate drainage and sewer system beneath the streets. By contrast, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cities of the same period were not as well planned and had primitive sanitation systems.

Because Moenjodaro's script has not been deciphered yet, archaeologists don't have a clear picture of its social structure. But the ruins point to a relatively egalitarian society; the 40,000 citizens lived in houses varying from two-storeyed structures to single-room barracks. Their few monumental buildings - a public bath, a granary, a pillared hall - were all for common use. From this evidence some experts speculate that Moenjodaro may even have been a rudimentary democracy.

Moenjodaro 's influence spread far and wide in the Indus Valley. The same weights and measures were standard throughout the region, and settlements hundreds of kilometres from Moenjodaro used the same basic city layout and the same-sized building bricks - extraordinary uniformity, given the slow pace of communication.

Moenjodaro's residents also had an eye for beauty and a sense of fun. The women decked themselves with jewellery; their gold ornaments, said Sir John Marshall, the British archaeologist who supervised the first excavations, were "so well finished and so highly polished that they might have come out of a London jeweller." Brightly coloured Moenjodaro dresses may even have been exported to Mesopotamia. Residents played an early form of chess and made charming clay animal toys for their children.

Ironically, by unearthing the glories of Moenjodaro in the 1920s, archaeologists nearly destroyed it for ever. The soil of the region is permeated with salts. Whenever it rained, the rainwater entering the soil had seeped into the brickwork too, carrying salts along with it. Once the ruins were uncovered and exposed to air, the corroding salts in the brickwork crystallized, causing the structures to disintegrate as the rains came. So rapid was the crystallization, said Sir John Marshall, "that within a few hours after a single shower of rain newly excavated buildings take on a mantle of white rime like freshly fallen snow."

Lack of Funds. The decay accelerated after 1932, when an irrigation barrage was built across the Indus 125 kilometres north of Moenjodaro, waterlogging the area and making further digging impossible. The remains excavated so far represent only the last few centuries of the city's existence before it was abandoned around 1500 BC. A fuller picture of the city's development will emerge only if the lower levels extending some 18 metres below the present ground level, can be studied.

The ruins have decayed steadily for decades, though Pakistani archaeologists have tried a number of techniques to preserve them. One method was simply to regularly brush salt crystals from the bricks. Another was to apply plaster to preserve them. In severely damaged areas, the original bricks were replaced. While these measures helped, shortage of funds allowed only a fraction of the structures to be maintained. Draining the site was an expensive proposition that Pakistan could not afford.

There was also another problem that the Pakistanis were hard pressed to tackle: the Indus. The river flows only a kilometre from the eastern edge of the site - too close for comfort. Indeed, repeated flooding by the Indus may have been the cause of Moenjodaro's abandonment. By 1960, the situation was critical, and Pakistan turned to UNESCO for help. Harold Plenderleith, director of the Rome-based International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and the Restoration of Cultural Property, warned after a visit that unless radical measure were taken, "all the existing excavations will crumble within the next 20 or 50 years and one of the most striking monuments of the dawn of civilization will be lost for ever."

So daunting did the challenge seem that some foreign expert even advocated covering up large part of the ruins, leaving only a small portion exposed and vulnerable to deterioration "But we couldn't accept that, recalls Mohammad Ishtiaq Khan, currently Pakistan's Director General of the Department of Archaeology and Museums. "It's the city's layout that makes it so unique, and you won't see that if only a few buildings are visible."

Finally in 1972, a team of archaeologists, engineers and geologists drew up an ambitious master plan. They recommended digging a ring of wells around the site and pumping to lower the water, table, as well as constructing dikes to prevent the Indus from shifting closer to the remains. In addition, they recommended planting special trees and grasses to protect the ruins from wind- blown salts.

Behind Schedule. All this was estimated to cost $7.5 Million, one-third of which would be borne by Pakistan. In January 1974, Rene Maheu, then Director General of UNESCO, appealed to "the conscience of the world" for $5 million to save the historic site. But by January 1980 only $1.2 million in government and private contributions had been collected, with India giving almost $50,000. Maheu's successor, Amadou Mahtar M'Bow, renewed the appeal in 1983, but the project's cost has now reached $19 million ($1= Rs 12).

Today, the total collected is only $6 million, and a special fund raising committee has been established, headed by Prince Takahito Mikasa, brother of the Japanese Emperor and an expert on the Indus Valley Civilization. But as I found during a recent visit to Moenjodaro, preservation work has already begun. "We couldn't afford to wait any longer," explains Abdul Kadir Shaikh, the Pakistani Supreme Court Judge who is chairman of the Authority for the Preservation of Moenjodaro.

Fourteen wells continuously drain the site and have lowered the water table to four metres below the ground. With another dozen wells scheduled to be operating by the end of the year, the water table should fall to ten metres. The drained water is pumped to an irrigation canal four kilometres away, and to ensure that it doesn't re-enter the site, rice cultivation has been banned within a two kilometre. Farmers are switching to less water intensive crops like wheat.

The river protection work, however, has fallen behind schedule because of lack of funds. "This scheme alone will cost ten million dollars," Justice Shaikh says. "If we had the money in hand we could do the job in two years".

On my last afternoon in Moenjodaro, I wandered through its deserted ruins, envisioning how they must have looked 4,000 years ago. Suddenly a shaft sunlight slanted on a crumbling wall, causing it to glow softly. As I stood there, enchanted , it struck me that we would be small people, indeed, if we did not preserve these remnants of long-vanished splendour.

Reproduced here with kind permission