In Xanadu (47 page)

Returning to the room, I saw that Louisa was still asleep. The sun had risen outside, but the curtains were drawn and the room was filled with a dim yellow half-light. Some of Louisa's covers had slipped off and
I
could just make out the long, lovely curve of her back and her left breast, pressed gently against the sheets.
I
sat on my bed and took it all in while I got back into my
charwal chemise.
It was only then that I noticed what had happened to her. What I had at first taken for shadows were in fact terrible weals and blotches on her skin. Great red bruises and smaller pink swellings covered all the exposed parts of her body. Something terrible had happened to her overnight.

When she awoke soon afterwards she was feeling dizzy and ill. What I had taken for the ravagings of vicious bed bugs was beginning to look more serious. Lou lay in bed all morning, getting paler and paler and feeling less and less well. She was not hungry and there seemed to be little I could do other than read to her. By lunchtime this had only succeeded in giving her a headache.

When Mick got up early in the afternoon he too took a look at Lou. He diagnosed an allergy and prescribed plenty of sleep and a diet of hashish and curd. This had no immediate beneficial effect and so at teatime I finally set about looking for a doctor. Armed with a Chinese phrasebook I made inquiries at the reception. In China, so it seemed, doctors never came to see patients, however ill they were. The halt, lame, crippled and infirm were all expected to get to the doctor. In Kashgar, this meant either crawling to the shaman in the bazaar and getting the prescribed fix of bat's wing, or else somehow arranging a lift to the hospital, on the far side of the town. We opted for the hospital.

The problem was getting there. I wandered the streets for an hour before I found a
tonga.
The first three made a point of not understanding what I wanted. The fourth refused to take me. The fifth tried to run me down. Finally, a sweet-natured ten-year-old agreed to take me for only three times the normal fare. It was a memorable moment. Then the Chini Bagh
chowkidar
refused to let the
tonga
come inside the consulate's gates. He justified his action by pointing at the horse's back end and oudly repeated a word I assumed to be the Turki for dung.
I
tried to help Louisa to the
tonga,
but she was too weak now to walk more than a few steps. The
tonga
would have to be carried to Louisa.

The sweet-natured ten-year-old did not like this plan, and spat at my shoes when I suggested it. He relented only when I doubled the agreed fare. He helped me unstrap the harness, then squatted moodily on the ground while I pulled the carriage down the half-mile drive to the main consulate building (to the delight of the consulate sweepers who jeered, shouted insults and threw things at me as
I
passed). The Pak truck drivers looked on impassively from their cooking fires.

We eventually got Lou to the
tonga,
the
tonga
to the horse, and the horse to the hospital. There followed an hour the likes of which
I
hope never to have to go through again. The hospital was a filthy place and smelt of urine and incontinent Uigurs. It reminded me of archive photographs of field hospitals on the western front in 1916. Men lay groaning on camp beds. Muffled shrieks echoed down the corridors. As
I
carried Louisa in, two
tonga
-driving ambulance men carried a corpse out. Then Louisa ran out of strength. She sat slumped forward on a chair while
I
tried to explain the problem to a Uigur doctor. He took very little interest, partly
I
think because he spoke no English and partly also because ten Uigur women were trying to explain their problems to him at the same time. In the middle of my explanation he simply turned heel and walked off. It was 3ver an hour before we were finally ushered into a surgery. Here a Chinese doctor ordered Lou to bare her arm. He then disappeared behind a curtain and emerged carrying an enormous syringe. It was an antihistamine dose about ten inches long by two inches wide. Ordering a Uigur nurse to hold Louisa still, he jabbed the needle into her bared upper arm. He did this with such violence that Louisa sobbed with pain. Then, rather than giving the injection in one go, he delivered the dose in short bursts over a period of five minutes, during which time the needle remained firmly stuck in Louisa's flesh.

She was beginning to have difficulty breathing: frightened, exhausted and in considerable pain, she became hysterical. She started screaming, and was sick all over the doctor, a bucket and the floor. The injection over, she collapsed onto a bed on the far side of the surgery, where she fell into a deep sleep. When she awoke three hours later, her swellings were down. By the time I got her back to Chini Bagh all the blotches and weals had completely disappeared, but she was still very weak and it was clear that she would not be able to move from her bed for several days.

For three days Lou languished in bed. She felt dizzy, weak and nauseous, and was unable to eat.
I
stayed by her bedside, or at any rate within Chini Bagh, nursing her, talking to the Pak drivers and searching for the 'Victory' loo. The quest for the latter was becoming something of a crusade for me, and I became adept at lying in wait for sweepers entering locked parts of the consulate, then rushing past them and making frantic searches before I was thrown out. By the time Lou recovered I had searched nearly every inch of the building. The 'Victory' was nowhere to be seen; perhaps it was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. My only discovery was a hidden storeroom smelling of dustsheet and attic. It was full of solid-looking Victorian furniture: a couple of massive and very tatty chintz armchairs, an old stove, and a few enormous carved bookshelves, all of which must originally have been brought to Chini Bagh by mule-train. Most melancholy of all was the discovery, in one corner, of a pile of old, scratched 78s: some Beethoven, a little jazz, and four or five Chopin waltzes. These must have been the records described by Peter Fleming in
News from Tartary.
'We led a country house existence,' he wrote of his time in Chini Bagh. 'One night we slept on the floor, drank tea in mugs .. . twenty-four hours later we were sitting in comfortable armchairs, with long drinks and illustrated papers and a gramophone playing....'

It is difficult to know whether any of the furniture I saw would have been recognized by Lady Macartney. When she a
rrived
the consulate was a mud-built bungalow, and all the furniture homemade and very primitive. It was built of white, unpainted wood as there was neither paint nor varnish to be get', and included one chair, the handiwork of the defrocked Dutchman, 'so high,' reported Lady Macartney, 'that I had almost to climb up to the seat. The back was quite straight and reached far above my head, and the seat was no more than six inches wide. There was no possibility of having a rest on it - all one's time was taken
up
with keeping oneself balanced.' Nevertheless, by the time the Macartneys returned to England in 1918, a new consulate had been built (according to a design of Mr Hogberg, one of the dour Swedes), and it had been filled with furniture brought from Europe. I rather fancied that Lady Macartney
would
have sat in one of the heavy chintz chairs. They conformed to what I imagined would have been her taste

If
I
was unlucky in my search for the 'Victory',
I
had more success in checking Polo's description
of
Kashgar. He seems to have liked it as much as he disliked the Kashgaris: The inhabitants live by trade and handicrafts.' he wrote, 'and have beautiful gardens and vineyards and fine estates. They grow a great deal of cotton beside flax and hemp. From this country many merchants go forth about the world on trading journeys. The natives are a wretched set of people, and include many Nestorian Christians, who have churches of their own. The people of the country speak a peculiar language.'

Nothing remains of mediaeval Kashgar. The mosques and the fortifications are all nineteenth century, although the decayed mud brick gives the impression of greater antiquity. Situated in territory disputed by four empires, the town has been sacked
too
many times for anything genuinely ancient to survive. Yet much of Polo's description still rings true. The hammering and hawking in the bazaar indicates the importance of trade and industry probably little developed from Polo's day. and the beautiful gardens
and
vineyards still survive. They line the roads, vine trellising
and
maize heads visible behind the whitewashed walls. The growing of hemp also still goes on apace (as Mick never tired of pointing out) but cotton cultivation seems to have died out. Certainly the Uigurs still wear simple cotton clothes, but they must import it for, as far as I could see, they do not seem to grow it themselves. This may, of course, have been because I arrived outside the cotton season, but there is another possibility. In Kashgaria there is a considerable amount of sheep farming; is it possible that Polo mistook the carts full of teased wool (they still trundle past) for convoys of picked cotton? Teased wool and cotton look almost identical. As for growing flax, it may well still go on, but as neither I, Lou, or Mick knew what flax looked like, we were unable to establish whether it is still cultivated.

The most exciting discovery we made was that, according to Salindi, there are still Nestorian Christians in Kashgar. Nestorius was a fifth-century Syrian bishop who had fine eyes, flowing red hair and controversial views on the nature of Jesus's manhood. Accused of over-emphasizing the humanity of Christ to the point of denying the divinity, he was hounded out of the Church at the Council of Ephesus in 43
1.
He was sent into exile in the Libyan desert, while his supporters fled east to Persia, Khorassan and beyond. There they lost contact with other Christian sects, thus preserving many of the ideas and practices of the early Church forgotten elsewhere. At the same time they took on many of the mores of the Eastern peoples they found around them: in Persia they abandoned clerical celibacy and authorized repeated marriages; later, under the influence of Islam, they came to hold Friday as a holy day and used to perform ablutions on entering church. Theirs became a remote and exotic sect. Kashgar was one of the centres of the faith, and from the twelfth century was the seat of a patriarch.

But it was among the Mongols that the Church became really influential. Nestorian missionaries penetrated the vastness of the Mongolian steppe just a century before the Mongols swept out to conquer Asia, so that when they did so they took Nestorianism with them. Ghengis Khan was brought up by a Nestorian guardian, and many of the Imperial Mongol family received baptism. It was probably Uigur Nestorians from Sinkiang who taught the Mongols to write, and Nestorians held many of the most important posts at the Mongol court. There appeared to be a real possibility Kubla Khan would convert and that Mongol Asia might become a Christian Empire. In 1253 Friar William of Rubruck was sent to the Mongol capital of Karakoram to investigate. He returned with news both good and bad. Certainly the Khan favoured Christians and attended their services, but the conduct of those services and the intellectual capabilities of the Nestorians left a little to be desired: