By early afternoon we had passed through another police checkpoint, and entered the oasis at Yarkand. Its boundaries were marked by a straight line of poplars: one minute we were in open desert, the next amid fertile farmland cross-cut with irrigation channels and mud-brick walls. Expanses of paddy were interspersed with vineyards, vegetable gardens and orchards. The relief of escaping from the desert was almost physical, yet was mixed with the fear of being spotted by the police and sent back. In the middle of the principal street of Yarkand a lorry carrying melons had crashed into a tractor, overturning the lorry and scattering the melons. The scene of the accident was swarming with Public Security guards, and our truck drew up in the middle of them. The tractor driver, a Uigur, was in deep argument with the lorry driver who was a Han Chinaman. No one was picking up the melons. Encour­aged by our driver, who had now realized that he was carrying an illegal cargo, we got back down below the dashboard. There we crouched uncomfortably for half an hour, able to see noth­ing except the gearstick and the crotch of our driver. The colli­sion was cleared up and we moved on. We determined to buy a basic disguise as soon as possible, and in the meantime took in as much of Yarkand as we dared. Polo says that the inhabitants are plagued by goitre (a large proportion of them have swollen legs, and great crops at the throat') and the same complaint was noticed by Sven Hedin, one of the handful of Europeans to get down this road in the nineteenth century. There were certainly one or two unusually portly burghers around, but they were swollen around the waist rather than the legs, and of the disease we could see no trace. Goitre is an iodine deficiency, resulting from bad drinking water, so the water supply must have been improved at some point this century.

  But the inhabitants of Yarkand still look remarkable: the men are furiously moustached and sport high Cossack busbies. These have white cotton tops and perch on their heads as precarious as the plates of an acrobat's balancing act.

  The Yarkand oasis is enormous; it continues without a break to Yecheng, forty kilometres away. We were dropped on the edge of the town by our driver, who shook our hands then drove quickly away, understandably nervous of being caught helping us. We set off through back lanes and across garden plots, trying to avoid the main streets of the town. Even so we attracted a considerable following. The people of Yecheng had never seen Europeans before, and they seemed determined to make the most of the opportunity. Peasants dropped their hoes; workmen left their lathes. Schoolchildren coming back from their lessons turned around and joined the growing throng who dogged our footsteps. The sensation of being a Pied Piper might have been quite enjoyable in Hamelin; now it was not only irritating but dangerous. Conceivably we might just slip past the Public Security guards if we were on our own, but it was difficult to see how anyone could avoid noticing a bay­ing crowd of at least sixty people. It was not even particularly flattering. As we had discovered in Kashgar, Uigurs regard Europeans as enormously ugly. Pakistanis think us the very image of perfection (fashionable Pakistani women wear suncream designed not to darken their skin, but to lighten it to a fairer, more European shade), but the Uigurs do not share these preferences. In Kashgar, Louisa had received none of the generous propositions she got the other side of the Karakorams. To the Uigurs we resemble ogres in English fairy­tale books: we are too big, our noses are long and flared, our lips flabby, our features misshapen and unattractive. Louisa's breasts came in for close, incredulous scrutiny from the Uigurs: how could such inflated watermelons exist? To the people of Yecheng we were no more than wondrous circus freaks to be poked and stared at. But for all this our entertainment value was enormous; attempts to shake off the escort were doomed to failure. We hurried: our followers sped up too. We stopped at a road junction, hoping that the Yechengis would lose interest and return home. They did not. On the main road we tried to flag down a truck. It took one look at our escort and accelerated off.

  It was three hours before we got another lift. The convey­ance was a cattle truck, filled not with heifers, but with thirty loud and argumentative Uigurs. They were crammed into a ridiculously small space with about one and a half square foot for every occupant. It was hot, dark, stuffy and nauseously smelly. One old man was sick; another could be heard sobbing in a comer. Our drivers were three financially acute Uigur farmers. They had set up the truck as a private taxi racket in competition with the irregular and unreliable government bus services; if the fare they charged us was at all representative, they must have been doing very nicely from the business. The journey was extremely unpleasant and was aggravated by a momentary panic when Louisa thought her money belt had been stolen. It had not, but it was only when we stopped at a han for the night that I discovered that my side pocket had been ransacked and my razor blades, malaria pills, insect repellent, sun cream and athlete's foot powder were all gone. It was i terrible waste: the Chinese cannot grow beards, do not suffer from malaria or sunburn, and were unlikely to guess what to do with the athlete's foot powder or the Jungle Juice insect repellent. My only consolation was the thought that the wretches might try to eat them.

  The next morning we continued our journey on top of a pile of coal.

  We arose before dawn and tried to find a truck to take us on from Khotan to Keriya, the next oasis. Often trucks in the han courtyard, four were broken down and five were returning to Kashgar. That left only one to choose from. Its driving cabin was full and we had to sit on an enormous mound of coal slag in the back. We climbed up, at once regretting the decision to wear our brand new white kurta tops from Lahore. But such concerns were soon dwarfed by much greater worries. Accompanied by loud judderings and crunching of gears, the lorry crawled out of the hart and made its way up the middle of the main street of Khotan, Lou and I, exposed to the world on top of our coal tip, kept our heads down to try and avoid unwanted police attention. We need not have bothered. The truck trundled up the principal thoroughfare, turned left and headed straight for the police station. We parked directly out­side the main entrance. The driver waved at us and went in to fetch a permit. We scrabbled around in the coal trying to dig ourselves into foxholes, covering our heads with jerseys in an effort to pass off as sleeping peasants, well aware that our clothes and rucksacks must have screamed out to every pas­sing Public Security officer. Yet no policeman emerged from the Public Security Bureau and after a few minutes the driver returned proudly bearing the new permit in his hand. He got back into the cab and turned the ignition. The truck coughed, coughed again and died. We held our breath while the driver tried a third time. Nothing happened. Into our foxholes we dived, pulling our jerseys back over our heads. For twenty min­utes the driver and his friend hammered away at the engine, until eventually it spluttered grudgingly back to life. At half its previous speed the truck crawled out of the police station and headed at walking pace into the main street. We were overtaken by a man on a donkey. Then, suddenly, we were in the desert. On all sides the shale flats stretched off into infinity, it was difficult to believe that anything could move slower, yet we again managed to cut our speed by half when, soon after Khotan, the tarmac road gave out and was replaced by a gravel track, pockmarked with boulder-sized potholes. It took a great effort of imagination to believe that we were travelling along the fabled Silk Route, one of the most famous highways in the world. In Scotland I have travelled along many more impos­ing footpaths.

  The day wore on and the truck's speed sunk lower and lower. We headed deeper into the desolation. A desert wind rose, covering us with sand and coal dust. At noon we had trav­elled for five hours and put no more than twenty miles behind us. Then, early in the afternoon, we came across a farmstead lying alone in the middle of the desert. It was a strange place. Surrounded by sand, with no water and no cultivation, it was difficult to see how the Uigurs who lived there could survive. There was nothing for them to eat except a few ill-looking chickens (how did the chickens survive?) and although they must earn some money feeding truck drivers, only a handful of trucks could pass by in an entire year. So I mused as the patron strangled and plucked one of the unhappy chickens. He burned it over a fire then hacked it to pieces with a carving knife. We ate it in silence. Then we drove on. Lou lay on her back amid the coal dust, listening to her Sony Walkman. I laboured through The Mayor of Casterbridge. Only one event of the afternoon impressed itself in my mind. This was when I soaked myself performing the difficult task of balancing on the back flap of the truck and urinating into the slipstream.

  Hours later, bored, caked in coal dust, smelling of urine, we pulled into the oasis of Keriya. The sun was setting. We had been driving, literally, from dawn until dusk, and in that time we had covered thirty-five miles.

  But Keriya proved full of surprises.

  The lorry dropped us off in a side street and we scuttled off to find the han before the Public Security guards found us. In the caravanserai compound we were confronted with a most unexpected sight. There, facing us, were not the usual burned-out beaten-up haulage trucks, but a row of gleaming, new Toyota Land Cruisers. More unexpected still was the boy we found cleaning them. He was dressed in a Japanese tracksuit and welcomed us in good English, which he spoke with a slight American accent. The boy, we discovered, was from Hong Kong, as were the Land Cruisers. They belonged to a party of German geomorphologists who were cooperating with the Chinese in a geological survey of the Tarim basin. The party consisted of twenty academics from Germany and China; the expedition had taken a decade to plan and was the first to be given permission to enter the area since the procla­mation of the People's Republic in 1949. Slightly annoyed at having been beaten down the road, but looking forward to meeting the geomorphologists, we took a room and set about cleaning ourselves up before joining the Germans for supper.

  Half an hour later, sweet-smelling, and wearing a marginally fresher set of clothes than those in which we had arrived, we crossed the compound to the han refectory. The air was full of smoke and the buzz of conversation. Fifty men and one or two fat German women were sitting at five large, round tables. In the middle of the tables were great heaps of food, the likes of which we had not seen since leaving the Begum's table in Lahore. There were plates of meat covered in delicious sauces, kebabs, mountains of noodles, exotic Chinese vege­tables, small batter envelopes filled with fascinating spicy con­fections, water chestnuts, great drifts of pilau rice. The seating had been arranged so that the Germans were alternated with orientals, and the latter were busy trying to teach the Germans to use chopsticks in a civilized manner. Their efforts met with only limited success and the conversation was punctuated with louds guffaws of hearty Teutonic laughter.

  Having broken in on this feast unexpected and uninvited, we thought it best to keep a low profile. We quietly took our seats in a corner and waited to be served. No one came to take our orders, nor did any of the Germans invite us to join them. After ten minutes, slightly embarrassed at not having done it sooner, I got up and went over to the senior German. I intro­duced myself, and held out my hand for him to shake. The German professor was struggling with a hundred-year-old egg as I approached, and he looked up, outraged that I should butt in at such a rare moment of pleasure. His moustache bristled. Leaving my hand unshaken, he looked me up and down, frowned and said; 'Who are you and what are you doing here?' Before I had time to answer, the professor turned to his left and consulted with a small Mao-jacketed Uigur. The conversation hushed. I stood beside the professor, hand still outstretched, grinning inanely. After what seemed like half an hour, but what could not in fact have been longer than thirty seconds, the professor turned around and addressed me again.

  The District Governor,' (he motioned to the Uigur), 'says that he did not expect two extra foreigners at his banquet. Go back to your seat. You will be served.'

  I went back to my seat. Lou looked at me and shook her held. A waiter brought us some leftovers. The game was up. Attempting to outwit the police, we had stumbled across a gathering of the entire local Party officialdom. We picked at our supper in gloomy silence. The following morning we would be sent back to Kashgar and maybe deported to Paki­stan. It was the end of the expedition.

  Meanwhile the noise level rose. Unworried by the intrusion of the two renegades, the Party cadres drank and laughed freely. The Germans downed the remaining bottles of Chinese pilsen, wiped their plates, burped, then began singing. The cadres countered by playing a noisy drinking game. It was a kind of human snap. Two cadres faced each other, and on the count of three (yi. er. san!) slammed their fists on the table, extending as they did so a certain number of fingers. The rules were simple. If both parties extended the same number of fin­gers, both had to drink a large glass of mao tai, the fierce rice wine which the Chinese love and which Westerners find difficult to distinguish from methylated spirits.

  Soon everyone was very drunk. The Germans rolled from side to side, cried, laughed, bawled out guttural drinking songs and slapped the Chinese on the back. The governor stood up and started to make a speech. After a few sentences everyone began clapping and the governor gave up. He had anyway forgotten what he was going to say. He sat down, waited for everyone to shut up, then stood up again. This time he proposed a toast. The professor followed suit. Minor party officials proposed further toasts and were followed by minor academics. More bottles of mao tai were brought and quickly emptied. A kind waiter brought a half-glass to each of us.

  The evening wore on. Germans began to slump forward onto the table tops. The songs got slower and increasingly emotional. The cadres stumbled off to bed. The governor got up, held himself steady and then, to our surprise, tottered over to our table, propped up by his two interpreters. He clasped us both to his chest and wished us good night. We were welcome in Keriya, he said. He was the friend of all enlightened foreign­ers. He poured us both glasses of mao tai, then politely inquired how we had got here. We explained our story to him, and told him that we had come to Keriya by coal waggon. He expressed horror at the danger and discomfort we had exposed ourselves to, and offered to arrange bus tickets to Charchan for us. Tomorrow, he said, we were to be his guests at a dancing dis­play. Then, the following morning, we could catch our bus. So saying, he poured three last glasses of mao tai, drank our health and staggered off to bed.

  We assumed that the governor's pleasantries had been the drunken ravings of a man unstudied by too much rice wine. We were proved wrong, however, when two bus tickets to Charchan were delivered to our door at ten o'clock the next day. The bus was not scheduled to leave until five a.m. the fol­lowing morning but with the governor as out protector we considered ourselves safe from the attentions of the Public Security guards, and celebrated our new-found freedom by breakfasting out of doors. Then we went back to bed.

  Late that afternoon we ventured out of the compound to explore. It did not take us long to appreciate that we had been stranded in one of the most beautiful places that either of us had ever seen. We roamed along mud-walled alleyways, past a set of perfect mediaeval street scenes: blacksmith's hammer­ing, children playing in broken donkey carts, old ladies in smocks sitting beside the road, nuts and dried apricots laid out in front of them. Men bent under the weight of shoulder poles staggered home carrying water from irrigation runnels; a boy squatted on his hams drawing in the dust with a bent stick.

  Aksakal, the white-beards, set out in groups of three to take the evening air. They were dressed in flowing robes of khaki serge, tied loosely at the waist. On their heads they wore mountain­ous white turbans. Some had Caucasian features. When they greeted other aksakal coming in the opposite direction they would clasp each other's hands, shake firmly, then stroke their beards with their right hands and conclude the ritual by touch­ing themselves on the back of the neck.

  Most of the houses we passed were of mud brick, but a few had walls built from bundles of pampas grass tied together to form thatched fences. The fences were broken with rickety wickets. They reminded me of English cottage gardens. Over the walls we could see Uigurs sitting under the shade of vine trellising, sipping cay from clay bowls. Others tended their sunflowers and climbing roses. There were poplar trees and apricot trees, mulberries and ash. There were sparrows in the branches and the leaves rustled in the breeze. After two days of desert it seemed nothing short of paradise.

  At one place in the main street a crowd had gathered in a ring. We pushed forward and found an acrobat in the middle. His daughter was his assistant and together they performed a series of age-old circus tricks: fire-breathing, balancing acts, and sword-eating. The girl concluded the show with a display of simple cartwheels. The crowd clapped enthusiastically then tried to make off before the acrobat passed the hat around. Not knowing the proper tactics we hung around and ended up paying for all of the Uigurs,

 

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