In xanadu, p.27
In Xanadu, page 27
In another part of the oasis we visited the new mosque, as yet still unroofed. While Lou sketched the mullah, the muezzin drove away the inevitable urchin escort with a six-foot-long knobkerry. Built of wood by the villagers themselves, the mosque was simple and lovely-an open-air wooden pavilion, giving onto a wooden basilica. It was similar to the Id Gah mosque but spared the clumsy ivan and dome of the Kashgar model. It was cheering to know that the traditional crafts still survive here; in other parts of Islam the concrete mosques erected by 'progressive' governments rival the worst modernist horrors in Europe. The Iranians are the worst offenders, followed closely by the Jordanians and the Turks.
Hence, by the back door of the mosque, into open countryside reminiscent of an eighteenth-century Dutch painting: long, sinuous lines of poplars set in a flat, green, fecund landscape. The ground was soft and springy and there were hens and white ducks picking around the irrigation channels. Sitting on the banks of a brook a Uigur peasant came up to us. He was wearing a bell-shaped skullcap edged in sable and he asked us if we were from Hindustan. Taking the remark as a compliment to her healthy suntan, Lou replied that we were.
We returned to our rooms to learn that we had had two visitors in our absence. The first was the governor who had called in person to deliver tickets to his dancing display. The second was an officer from the Public Security Bureau who wanted to see our permits. Hoping that our first visitor would protect us from the second, we adjourned to supper where we found the Germans slightly more friendly since our adoption by the governor. The German professor was in a great state of excitement. The reason for this was explained to us by a young expert in glaciation from Hamburg. Apparently the governor, after delivering our tickets, had gone straight to the professor and asked him whether he would be so good as to sleep with his (i.e. the governor's} new and very attractive young wife. This offer had been made two years previously when the professor had first visited Keriya to prepare the ground for the current expedition. Then he had refused saying that he was too old for such pleasures. It seems the governor had misunderstood him and thought that the professor meant the proffered wife was too old. Far from being put out by this observation, the governor had instantly divorced his wife and married his current belle, a renowned Uigur beauty from Khotan. When the professor had refused a second time the governor was mortified: 'I want some noble, enlightened blood in my family,' he had begged. 'Are you sure. Professor, that your loins are too tired?'
The strange thing is that a similar offer may have been made to Marco Polo when he came here. It is the origin of one of his few saucy anecdotes. The people of Pein {Keriya) have a custom,' he writes, 'which I must relate. If the husband of any woman goes away upon a journey and remains away for more than twenty days, as soon as that term is passed the woman may marry another man, and the husband may also marry whoever he pleases.'
Sir Henry Yule, in his footnote to this passage, writes rather disapprovingly that this 'may refer to the custom of temporary marriages which seem to prevail in most towns of Central Asia which are the halting places of caravans, and the morals of which are much on a par with those of our own seaport towns, and from analagous causes. Kashgar is also noted in the East for its chaukan, young women with whom the traveller may readily form an alliance for the duration of his stay, be it long or short.'
As there seemed to be no chaukan available at supper, Louisa and I were forced to sit next to the young expert in glaciation. He was an appalling bore.
German: My father is in semi-conductors. I too vood have gone into semi-conductors, had I not discovered moraines.
Louisa: How interesting! What is a moraine?
German: Tzere are three principal kinds of moraine. Tze first is called a lateral moraine, tze second a medial moraine. Some people are interested in lateral and medial moraines. I am not. I am interested in terminal moraines!
Louisa: Gosh.
German: Terminal moraines are tze deposit left when tze rock fragments in a glacier are left stranded by tze melting ice pack. For tzis to happen it is very important zhat ze glacier is neither retreating nor advancing. It must be stationary! Stationary I say!
WD: Some more tea?
German: However if tze ice advances over a terminal moraine, tze sediments become contorted and folded. (Much gesticulation.) Zis produces structures resembling tectonic deformation. Such a feature is known as a push moraine. Push moraines are BEAUTIFUL! BEAUTIFUL!
(Rambles on at great length and tedium.)
We were saved from more of this by an envoy of the governor who came in and announced that all our company was requested by the Keriya Communist Party at the Keriya People's Hall. It was, on this occasion at least, an invitation we could not refuse.
The governor was being characteristically modest when he called the performance that he laid on for us a dancing display. It was Kenya's answer to the Royal Variety Show, an extravaganza of local Uigur farming talent, comprising singing, dancing, strumming on balalaikas, a little light operetta, and some curious slapstick comedy sketches. It was rounded off by a little Uigur pantomime whose meaning remained obscure. The show was an interesting reflection of Sinkiang's position as a cultural crossroads: the gestures of the dance seemed to be drawn from India, the twanging balalaika from Russia, the costumes and facial features from China. But as entertaining as the performance itself was the audience of excited Uigurs who, led by a row of mentally handicapped children at the rear of the hall, expressed their enjoyment in a chorus of hoots, whistles and inarticulate (if appreciative) gargling noises. The governor seemed to be enjoying the show more than anyone and himself put on a splendid performance: he showered us with sweets, melons, nuts and drinks, asked us at the end of every act whether we were enjoying ourselves, and enthusiastically offered his wife around the junior German academics. After nearly three hours of this, the cast appeared for a last bow, the audience exploded into tumultuous applause, and the handicapped children began weeping. We filed out led by the governor, who invited us all back to the han dining hall for a quick glass of mao tai. We excused ourselves saying we were tired, and crossed the compound to our roon.
The door was open and the light was on. Two men were inside bending over my rucksack. I rushed in, then stopped. The men were not burglars as I had first assumed. They were Chinese Public Security guards.
There followed a very unenjoyable three hours at the Keriya Public Security Bureau. We played ignorant foreigners. We played outraged Englishmen. We played harmless idiots. We threatened and cajoled, flashed our letters, smiled and flirted. We outlined the nasty things that would happen to them all when our friend the District Governor came to hear about our arrest. We listed the honours that would be heaped on the officers for helping our expedition. I went and fetched an interpreter and we went through the whole rigmarole again, this time in Chinese. Despite now being mutually comprehensible, we made no visible progress. They repeated their position over and over again. We had illegally entered a forbidden area. We had no permit. We must be fined and sent back to Kashgar. But gradually, as our claims to influence grew, a seed of doubt lodged itself in their minds. Perhaps the imminent royal visit would be called off. Perhaps Britain really would break diplomatic relations. Sometime after midnight we wrung our first concession. Before they deported us they would telegraph their superiors in Urumchi. By one we got them to agree to a second concession. They would let us go to bed, and wait until the next morning before telegraphing or pursuing their inquiries any further. Everyone was tired. Everything could be sorted out amicably the following moming.
We went back to the han, packed our bags and went to sleep for four hours. At five we were up and creeping past the Public Security Bureau like naughty children off to raid a larder. Using the tickets the governor had bought us, we got aboard the dawn bus. The checkpoint the far side of Keriya was unmanned. Feeling very uncourageous and more than a little worried as to the consequences of our escape, we juddered off out of the oasis and back into the cold wastes of the Taklimakan.
I dreamt that I was swimming across a sea of golden syrup. The air overhead was a pleasing shade of orange and the syrup was warm and pleasantly sticky. At First I swam happily, but I slowly became aware that I was sinking, or rather being sucked down. Surprised and rather alarmed, it dawned on me that I had managed to swim into a whirlpool. I made a mental note: watch out for whirlpools the next time you go swimming in seas of golden syrup. Sadly there was little chance of doing anything constructive to save the situation. I was shooting downwards in a perfect swirling spiral, dizzy and sickly fast. Suddenly the swirling stopped and I realized that although I was still covered in golden syrup, I was now sitting trussed up in a dentist's chair. Everything was as a dentist's surgery should be, except that the dentist, whose back was turned to me, was dressed in a strangely familiar black cowl. The dentist turned around and came towards me clutching a huge pair of pliers. She said: 'Now William, this won't hurt,' and as the pliers plunged into the recesses of my mouth I suddenly realized that the dentist was Laura.
I woke up screaming. Feeling the front of my mouth with my tongue, I realized that the loose front tooth which had been worrying me since Kashgar was now very wobbly indeed.
'Are you all right?' asked Lou.
'What do you mean?'
'You've been whimpering for the last five minutes.'
'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I just saw Laura.'
'Laura?'
'Yes. She was coming at me with a pair of pliers.'
Lou, bemused, shook her head, and returned to The White Hotel. Around us our fellow passengers were beginning to wake up. It was very cold and the Uigurs had come fully equipped with sheepskins and massive fur pelts which gave the bus a rather neolithic look. Some of the Uigurs nibbled seeds, others cut slices of watermelon with savage-looking knives. All smoked fat cigarettes emitting a smell suspiciously like, hashish. The geography textbooks have us believe that hemp is cultivated in China exclusively for its rope-making qualities. This is nonsense. As our journey demonstrated, the Uigurs are far from blind to the ability of hashish to make a long, boring bus journey pass in a pleasant state of euphoric semi-dormancy. It is to the Sinkiang People's Autobus Company what McEwen's Export is to British Rail.
The disadvantages of travelling with a busload of stoned Uigurs only became apparent later. An hour after sunrise the early winter winds began to blow and by noon they had turned into quite respectable sandstorms. The windows were shut and everyone waited to see what would happen. Polo's The Travels contains descriptions of many of the horrors of the desert, but does not mention sandstorms. This is surprising as the buran of the Taklimakan are some of the most ferocious of any desert in the world. Of the descriptions of buran left by those who experienced them, none is as evocative as the much-quoted passage in von Le Coq's Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkistan:
Quite suddenly the sky grows dark ... a moment later the storm bursts with appalling violence. Enormous masses of sand, mixed with pebbles, are forcibly lifted up, whirled around and dashed down on man and beast; the darkness increases and strange clashing noises mingle with the roar and howl of the storm. The whole happening is like hell let loose,...
Nothing quite as bad as von Le Coq's buran hit us, but as the wind increased in strength the sand from the dunes began to drift onto the road. At first this simply slowed us down, but gradually it began to make the going almost impossible. The bus finally drew to a halt in front of a huge drift thirty miles outside Keriya. The driver covered his mouth with a rag and disappeared outside with a shovel. A handful of the more compos mentis Uigurs and I went out to help him; the rest stayed in the bus puffing at their reefers. We shovelled away at the sand and placed wooden sleepers under the wheels to give the tyres some purchase. It worked. After an hour of hard labour the bus moved on, but drew to a halt only five miles further up the road. Again we all got out and shovelled.
The rest of that day was spent edging forward in this manner. At six the sun set over the distant Kunlun mountains, darkening the vast emptiness of the desert. Through the rattling of the bus came the quiet murmur of the Muslims saying their evening prayers. It was nearly midnight when we arrived at Niya.
The caravanserai was filthy, cold and had no food, but neither, thankfully, did it have any Public Security guards. We slept like children, but only until five o'clock. To keep ahead of the police we knew we had to be off before dawn. We also thought it wiser to change our transport. If the Keriya police had telegraphed forward to Charchan, the Public Security there would be expecting us on the bus. We guessed that we stood more chance of getting through travelling by truck. So, feeling ill and exhausted, we tramped around the different caravanserai dormitories looking for a driver who was leaving immediately, heading in the right direction and prepared to take us with him. Only one filled all these criteria: as at Khotan, we set off into the desert on top of a pile of coal. To mark the occasion we wore for the first time the 'disguises' we had bought in Keriya. Mine consisted of a Mao suit topped by a green Uigur skullcap; Louisa wore a printed dress and a white veil. From front-on, in broad daylight, neither disguise fooled anyone. Indeed on several occasions they caused hysterical peals of laughter from Uigurs who otherwise might never have noticed us. Nevertheless we thought that the 'disguises' did look vaguely convincing from the back. If ever we came to a checkpoint, we planned to fall forward on our faces and pretend to be asleep. Only the most officious guard would be rude enough to wake a sleeping couple, or so, at any rate, we hoped.
The next two days were exhausting. The constant worry of being detected, occasional pangs of hunger and thirst, the physical effort of digging ourselves out of sand dunes, the day-tine heat and the extreme night-time cold, all these different strains began to take their toll. Particularly unpleasant was the aggressive old man with whom we shared our coal slag. Our relationship got off to a bad start on the first day when, during a mid-morning cay stop, I blew my nose in his presence. For this unforgivable faux pas I earned myself a violent torrent of abuse. It appears that my crime was twofold: firstly blowing my nose while he was drinking, secondly using a handkerchief. Apparently polite Uigur etiquette demands that one walks away from any imbibing company, raises one's left hand to the ridge of one's nose and blows heartily through the nostrils, aiming to discharge the deposit onto the ground. Any overhang should then be wiped away, and the hand then cleaned on the shirt front. This was certainly how the old man approached the problem. It was on this same cay stop that my false front tooth finally fell out. This had a disproportionately lowering effect on my morale. It was now four days since my razor blades had been stolen and the combination of an unshaven yet unbearded face, a weatherworn visage and a gap-toothed smile was clearly an unpleasant one. It was several days before I next saw a mirror and was able to take in the full horror of it myself, but its effects on those around me was immediately obvious. It was about this time that little Uigur children began running away from me, screaming and shrieking for their parents.
That night we reached Charchan. Outside the caravanserai we ne the best kebabs in the world, then slunk quickly off to bed before our 'disguises' caused a riot. Long into the night we could hear the shrieks of laughter outside. Neither of us could sleep. A day exposed to the full glare of the desert sun had given us both bad sunburn, while the night chill was unbearable. We lay awake in our coal-grimed clothes, at once burning and shivering, a combination that was as unpleasant as it was unusual. We were up and waiting for the track driver when he appeared at four-thirty the following morning.
The strain was now really beginning to show. We had been on the move for nearly a week and in that time had only one full night's sleep. Louisa was silent and irritable; I had sunk into a state of exhausted, toothless gloom. We had diarrhoea. Our clothes were torn and we were both filthy: neither of us had washed since Keriya. I was a terrible sight; poor Lou looked a little better but felt much worse. The colour had gone from her cheeks and she had ceased to take trouble with her appearance; for the first time she was beginning to look a little dishevelled. The next morning, after another sleepless night in another filthy caravanserai, she finally reached the end of her endurance. The coal truck left Waxari before dawn. Shortly afterwards she said: 'I think that I am going to be sick,' then was, several times. We arrived at the oasis of Charchalik about nine in the morning. There she announced that she was quite simply incapable of going on.
'If I spend one more minute on this truck,' she said quietly but very firmly, ‘I will die.'
We took a bedroom from the club-footed caravanserai keeper. There we ordered a basin of hot water, then washed, dried and lay on our beds wondering how long it would be before the police came to hear of our arrival. They heard very quickly. At quarter past ten there was a knock on the door. Lou was asleep so I got up to open it. Outside stood two Public Security guards.
We were fined and made to sign a confession but we were not sent back. We had got far enough to make it more effort than it was worth. Instead, the next day, we were bundled into a police Jeep and deported northwards out of the security zone to the town of Korla near Turfan. There, still under arrest, we were made to buy tickets to Peking and seen onto the train.
We had got as far as the border of the desert of Lop, what we learned later was the Chinese nuclear testing ground. It was this discovery that gave our final day in Charchalik a special poignancy.
After the police discovered us in the morning, they locked us up in our hotel room, perhaps for lack of anywhere better to put us. That evening they let us out to eat supper. Lou did not feel like eating, so I was taken on my own to a shabby restaurant owned by a deaf mute. As he was possibly the only other person for five hundred miles who was unable to speak or understand either Chinese or Uigur I felt a certain bond between us and lingered in his cafe, toying with a bowl of chop suey, while the Public Security guard waited by the door. It was only after half an hour that I began to notice how many other cripples there were in the restaurant. It seemed that there was not a single healthy person in the town: some had terrible contorted limbs and strange disfiguring marks on their skin. A few were completely bald; others were thin and wasted. There can only be one explanation for this gathering in one small town. It must have been something to do with radiation from the testing ground. No wonder the police were so quick to deport us: we appeared to have stumbled across an oasis populated by mutants.
