INCARNATION (36 page)

‘Why does the tunnel smell of flowers?’ he asked.

She paused and breathed in deeply.

‘Roses,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t make much sense. My father once told me about this tunnel. He said that, in the days of Yakub Beg, the ground was strewn with roses. They grew them all year round, in great quantities, then they brought them down here and laid them on the ground all the way from Kashgar to Abakh Hoja’s Tomb. The practice continued for almost fifteen years, then Yakub Beg was defeated and the tunnel sealed. It was known as the “Velvet Path”. Others called it the Tariqat Allah or the Sabil al-Firdaus, the “Path to Paradise”. They used to carry the sick along it. Some went all the way on their knees. There are stories of miracles.’

David looked round him at the naked walls and uneven floor. He saw no miracles. Yet something in the soil or the air conspired to hold the last traces of the flowers that had been left there by a short generation of pilgrims. He glanced up. Every so often, he could see glass lamps hanging from the struts, grimy now and without light; but in every one a candle still waited for the touch of flame.

Less frequently, he could see the ends of narrow ventilation shafts. Putting his hand to one, he could feel a faint touch of fresh air. They must have been skilfully hidden in the fields above, and angled or cowled in some way to allow rain to run off without flooding the tunnel.

He halted for breath. Nabila waited for him a few yards ahead. At first he could hear only his own breath, rasping a little in the close atmosphere. Then, as his head cleared, he heard something else, It sounded like footsteps. Behind him. Even as he strained to listen, it stopped.

‘Did you hear that?’ he asked.

‘Hear what?’

‘That sound behind us. Here, let me have the torch.’

She passed it to him, and he swung the beam back into the tunnel the way they had come. There was nothing

visible but the trailer and the frail bundle on it, walls and floor, the marks of the little vehicle’s wheels.

He passed the torch back to Nabila, and they headed on. David had calculated that roughly two yards separated one set of struts from the next. Keeping a mental record of how many they had passed, he stopped when they had reached an estimated mile. He glanced at his watch. Just over half an hour had elapsed since they entered the tunnel.

‘Would you like me to take the trailer?’ asked Nabila.

‘No, I’m all right. Another mile, perhaps - then you can take over.’

They did not talk much as they progressed through the tunnel. The thick air made breathing difficult, and talking a struggle.

They paused to manoeuvre the trailer round a heap of earth that had fallen into the tunnel. As they did so, David heard the sound again, soft footsteps cushioned by the soil. Nabila turned too.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I heard it that time.’

David took the torch and went back several yards.

‘Jenwen?’ he called. ‘Is that you, Jenwen?’

There was no answer. He called again, but his voice was swallowed up by the thick walls and the darkness and the stillness.

‘It must be Jenwen,’ he said to Nabila. ‘There’s no one else back there, surely.’

‘He may be following his father’s corpse.’

‘Then why doesn’t he just stay with us?’

‘I ... I’m not sure.’

He sensed the hesitation in her voice, but did not pursue the matter. If Jenwen wanted to dog their footsteps, it could do no harm to let him. It was irritating, no more than that.

They went on. Half an hour took them another mile. Feet followed them all the way: feet that kept pace yet never caught up. It was hard to tell whether it was one pair of feet or more. Sometimes David stopped suddenly, and then, for half a second, he would catch it behind him.

They halted at the end of the second mile, and Nabila walked back to take the trailer. As she did so, she looked back down the tunnel. ‘Look,’ she whispered.

David turned. Everything was silent. The scent of long-dead roses multiplied. Nabila switched off the torch.

Along the tunnel behind them, as far back as they could see, candles were burning inside the little lamps. The flames flickered and grew still, flickered and grew still. David held his breath. He expected to see someone at last, to catch sight of their pursuer - or pursuers -stepping into the light like an actor on to an illuminated stage. But no one moved.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said. ‘We won’t harm you.’ He said it in Uighur, then in Chinese, but no one stirred. Out there, on the edge of the dark shadow, where the light ended, he saw what might have been movement and equally might have been a candle bending with the weight of its own flame.

‘Let me have the torch again,’ he said. Nabila put it in his hand, and he switched it on. For a quick moment, he was certain he saw something move, a low, crouching figure, very pale. But it had been no more than a flash. and within moments his certainty had faded. ‘Let’s keep moving,’ he said.

They pressed on as before, their feet thick against the soft soil. ‘I think I know who they are,’ whispered Nabila. ‘My father once told me a story about the people who live in the tunnels beneath Kashgar.’

‘Tunnels? You mean this isn’t the only one?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve sometimes heard other people refer to them. They’re supposed to have been built a long time ago, during a siege, to let people move about in safety. But I can’t be sure. They may just be a legend.’

‘Like the people who live in them?’

‘I don’t know. What would they live on? Where would they find water? They’d go blind without light.’

‘But someone or something is in here with us, there can be no doubt of that.’

‘No. Perhaps they aren’t a legend after all. My father said that when the Chinese defeated Yakub Beg some of his soldiers took their wives and children down to the tunnels, and that they stayed there and grew old and died, and that the children had children of their own.’

‘Is that what you think?’

She shook her head.

‘There are people in every city who drop behind, like someone at the rear of a camel train in the desert. Who knows where they go, what they do to survive?’

They walked on in silence, not knowing what to make of any of this. There were footsteps, certainly, and other tiny noises they could not interpret. The tunnel stretched out in front of them, as though it meant to swallow them.

They passed an opening to one side. David stopped and shone the torch inside. Another, narrower tunnel had been dug through the earth, its sides strengthened by rough mud-bricks that must have been made down here and dried somewhere on the surface.

‘It seems to go back quite a distance,’ said David. ‘I wish there was a chance to explore, but we’ve no time to waste.’

They passed two more tunnels. Though they stopped and looked inside only to find them empty, each time they were assailed by a sense of watching eyes somewhere back in the darkness. Had they learned to see in the dark after all? When David looked back down the main tunnel the lamps had been extinguished.

Three hours after stepping into the tunnel, they came to a square door built of heavy timber and studded with enormous iron nails. A huge brass lock occupied about a quarter of each wing. Koranic verses had been inlaid along the sides, in Arabic and Chinese. In the centre, an inscription had been engraved in a lozenge-shaped sheet of copper: ‘The Shrine of Abakh Hoja, may God have compassion on him’.

David dropped the rope, and he and Nabila set to work on the lock. Though untended all this time, the door was still in good shape, and the lock as hard to break open as it had been when a key was last turned in it.

‘What do we do?’ asked Nabila. In spite of her equilibrium, she was beginning to find the tunnel claustrophobic and unnerving, and the discovery that they might find themselves trapped at the very end of their journey had brought her close to panic.

‘It’s a beautiful door,’ said David, ‘but we have no choice. I’ll have to break the hinges.’ 

‘With what?’

In reply, he opened one of his rucksacks and drew out a short crowbar.

It wasn’t easy to slip the flat end of the crowbar between the door and the jamb, but the wood had softened a lot, and, once he had forced an opening, the rest was simple. Under pressure, the wood and screws gave way, and the door fell in at the back. Laying one wing of the door to one side, they pushed the other back on its hinges. Ahead of them stood a steep flight of steps, cobweb-choked like those at the other end.

‘I’ll go up first,’ said Nabila. Suddenly, she wanted to be free of the darkness. ‘Will you be all right on your own?’

‘Yes, I’ll be fine. You’ll have to haul the old man up. We’ll leave the trailer down here, though - there’s no need for it now. Here’s the rope.’

She climbed up, choking on dust and cobwebs, striking out at spiders as they fell on her hair and face. Ten steps. Twenty steps. And then, quite abruptly, a ceiling above her head. She must be under the floor of the shrine. Careful not to stumble backwards, she reached up and placed one hand against the ceiling, fearful that it would be as stoutly locked against her as the door had been. She pushed upwards, and at first it seemed that it was locked on the other side, or that heavy weights had been laid on top of it; but another push persuaded the flooring above her to give way, and a last shove sent it flying back with a crash.

‘Are you all right up there?’ called David. His voice sounded weak and lost, as though it already belonged to a different world.

‘I’m fine’ she called back. ‘How are our friends?’

‘Very quiet.’

She took a deep breath and climbed out of the opening. Her eyes felt blurred. The air up here seemed entirely fresh after the tunnel, and she drank it in greedily. She hadn’t a clue where she was. Taking the torch from her belt, she snapped it on.

Her head was just above a tiled floor, and her first guess was that she was in one of the many rooms of the shrine complex. Then the torch moved on, and she picked up a clutter of strange shapes. Slowly, she brought the light back and focused on the shapes one by one. They were nothing more than pieces of rubble, some large, some tiny, scattered everywhere across the floor. The further out she looked, the more there seemed to be.

‘David,’ she shouted down, ‘I think you should come up here.’

She scrabbled out on to the floor and waited for him. There was a scuffling sound, then he was with her. Carefully, she pointed out to him what she had seen.

He took the torch from her and switched it off. No need to draw attention to themselves. He then looked up. An open sky with the faintest hint of dawn, sprinkled with stars, with Venus rising. And far off against the horizon, the setting moon.

‘They’ve destroyed it,’ he said. ‘They’ve demolished the shrine.’

Even as he spoke, a heavy engine burst into life not far away.

‘That’s a tank engine,’ he said. He walked a little in the direction from which the sound was coming.

Lined up in rows, a division of heavy tanks stood waiting for dawn. Their crews were sleeping on the ground beside their vehicles. Someone laughed nearby, then a gruff voice told him to be quiet.

‘Let’s haul our equipment up and see if we can get out of here before light. I don’t give much for our chances if they clap eyes on us.’

‘What about Ma Deming?’ Nabila asked.

‘I think it’s best if we leave him where he is. He’s right underneath where the shrine used to be. This rubble is probably packed full with old bones. If there’s any blessing here, he’ll get his share.’

‘And what about them?’ she asked.

‘Our friends in the tunnel?’

‘Yes. Do we leave this doorway open for them to find a way out of here, or do we close it to stop the army rinding a secret way in to Kashgar?’

‘I don’t think the army needs secret entrances. Let’s leave it open, let them do what they choose with it.’

He went back down and started attaching bags to the rope. Nabila hauled them up and stacked them to one side. It would be a lot to carry for the first phase of their journey.

David’s head appeared at last above the entrance hole. Nabila helped him up. Her hand remained in his. He could barely see her amid so much blackness.

‘I’m glad you came,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t do this without you.’

She drew him to her and kissed him. Here and there around them, tank drivers set their engines racing.

She brushed a tangle of cobwebs from his hair and stroked his cheek, then kissed him harder. That was when the voice came.

‘Step apart slowly, keep your hands in the air. Don’t even breathe.’ The language was Chinese, the dialect Cantonese.

As they pulled away, David looked round. A single guard holding a heavy-duty submachine-gun.

‘Kneel down,’ commanded the guard. ‘I’m getting help.’

D
avid looked round in desperation. Their only weapons were in the bags. He still held the torch: it was a long Maglite, made of metal and capable of being used as a club. But how the hell was he going to get close enough to have half a chance?

The soldier made up his mind for him.

‘
Shoudiantong
!’ he barked.

David had no choice. He lowered his arm and let the torch fall to the ground. He did not think the guard would shoot them unless provoked by a direct assault. But once he examined the contents of the bags neither his life nor Nabila’s would be worth anything.

David’s Chinese accent was far from perfect; but he realized that the soldier, probably away from Canton for the first time in his life, would most likely take it for a regional dialect of Mandarin, which he would know only imperfectly, if at all. In the dark, he and Nabila could pass as Han Chinese.

‘We’ve just got here from Yengisar,’ he said. ‘The Uighurs started attacking us. Our children were killed. and my wife and I just got away with our lives.’ He hoped the remark about dead children would make its mark. 

‘There’s been no word of trouble in Yengisar.’ 

David took a step towards him. 

‘What do you mean, “There’s no word of trouble”?’ he asked. ‘They’re killing Chinese children. There’s blood everywhere. Can’t you take our word for it? We got out with a few possessions, and we headed this way hoping the army would look after us. We want to go back to Peking. I was a senior cadre, I was due for promotion and a one-way ticket back home, and now look at me.’