In Xanadu (49 page)

The Uigurs regard the desert as an evil place. In Turki its name means 'go in and you won't come out'. In the bazaars there are strange tales of the demons and half-men who live within its borders. These tales have a long pedigree, and are recorded by many of the travellers who have passed through the desert. The first European to make the journey was the hugely corpulent Friar John of Plan de Carpini. His account of the local legends perhaps reads a little uncritical to the modem eye:

The inhabitants of this desert are reported to be wild men, who cannot speak at all and are destitute of joints in their legs. If they fall they cannot arise alone by themselves. But they are prudent and make felts of camel's hair, with which they clothe themselves, and which they hold against the wind. If at any time the Tartars, pursuing them, chance to wound them with their arrows, they put herbs into their wounds, and fly strongly before them.

Polo's account is also full of strange legends.

There is a marvellous thing related of this desert, which is that when travellers are on the move by night, and one of them chances to lag behind or to fall asleep or the like, when he tries to gain his company again he
will
hear spirits talking, and suppose them to be his comrades. Sometimes the spirits will call him by name; and thus shall a traveller oft-times be led astray so that he never finds his party. Many have perished in this way. Sometimes stray travellers
will
hear the tramp and hum of a great cavalcade of people away from the real line of the road, and taking this to be part of their own company they will follow the sound; and when day breaks they find that they are in an ill plight. Even in daytime one hears these spirits talking. And sometimes you shall hear the sound of a variety of musical instruments, and still more commonly the sound of drums        

At first sight. Polo's tale looks just as fanciful as that of Plan de Carpini. But while the Friar's account is obviously ridiculous, the story Polo tells is a common one, first recorded in the seventh century and still current in Kashgar in 1916 when Ella and Sir Percy Sykes heard it at first hand from a Hindu trader. The Hindu had been in the Taklimakan after dark when a sudden light revealed a broad road along which marched an army, dressed, so he thought, in Turkish uniforms. Then the army vanished only to give place to droves of cattle and sheep. The account is almost identical to that of the great Buddhist traveller Hsuan Tsang, who saw, one thousand three hundred years before the trader, 'a body of ghostly troops amounting to several hundreds covering the sandy plain - and the soldiers were clad in fur and felt. And now the appearance of horses and camels and the fluttering of standards and lances....'

The only soldiers we saw were those of the People's Liberation Army, and they were far from ghost-like. At eleven o'clock the leading truck slowed down, and the convoy pulled to a halt in the middle of the desert. Soldiers spilled out to urinate and stretch their legs. We were just about to do likewise when our driver signalled for us to stay where we were, and to keep our heads down. The truck in front of us had also taken on a hitchhiker, a Uigur boy a few years younger than ourselves. There had been no room for him in the driver's cabin so he had sat outside on a tarpaulin at the rear of the truck. There he was spotted by the officer in charge of the convoy. The officer first reprimanded the driver, then ordered the boy to come down. Nervously he did so. Towering above the boy, the officer shouted insults at him. The Uigur lowered his head, but did not reply. Then the officer gave the boy a vicious shove. He stumbled backwards, and fell heavily on his backside. The officer rounded on him. He kicked him in the ribs and the arms, and directed one blow at the boy's head. The Uigur squirmed in the dust and cried out when struck but made no attempt to defend himself. The other soldiers stood by, laughing. Eventually the officer kicked the boy off the road, and returned to his truck. The convoy moved off. The boy was left lying by the roadside.

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.