Journeys on the Silk Road (32 page)

Cardigan Bay along the Welsh coast had little to attract enemy bombers. But the National Library of Wales, prominent and almost impossible to camouflage, could serve as a landmark for aircraft en route to attack British cities, including the key port city of Liverpool, just 100 miles northeast. The main fear in Aberystwyth during the early days of the war was of a stray bomb rather than deliberate attack.

Air raid precautions were established at the Welsh library. Buckets of water and sand were placed throughout the building, along with stirrup pumps, hoes, shovels, and other fire-fighting equipment. Scholars whose pre-war days were spent scrutinizing ancient Hebrew script or early European printed books became familiar instead with steel helmets, respirators, and asbestos cloths. Twenty-four-hour rosters were organized so the collections were never unattended. Each night two armed constables patrolled the premises.

Room had to be found for the massive influx of books, manuscripts, prints, paintings, and people. Carpenters erected shelves, and rooms were assigned for the collections and staff. Every bit of space was needed. Even ancient papyri found a temporary home in a disused elevator shaft.

Overseeing Stein’s Chinese scrolls and other non-European treasures was Jacob Leveen, the British Museum’s deputy keeper of the Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts. He was a Hebrew scholar who spent much of the war in Wales. Air-attack aside, his biggest worry was theft, and he feared the Oriental collection was the most vulnerable. Unlike the material of other departments that went to Aberystwyth, the Oriental manuscripts were not isolated from the public but were housed in the Readers’ Room. Locks on the fifty-five latticed manuscript cases were flimsy. He wanted chains and padlocks. The most secure option of all, however, was being secretly constructed only a few minutes’ walk from the library. When finished, it would create a place in which Stein’s collection would be strangely familiar. For tucked into Hangman’s Hill, just 200 yards below the National Library of Wales, a manmade tunnel was being carved. During the war years, it was surrounded with every bit as much secrecy as Abbott Wang’s grotto, and guarded far more closely.

Even before World War II began, thought had been given to creating underground storage for Welsh cultural treasures. A tunnel was first suggested in late 1937. Work began in August 1938, by which time the British Museum had agreed to pay half the cost of the bomb-proof cave in return for half of the space. The horseshoe-shaped tunnel—six-and-a-half feet wide, ten feet high, and eighty feet long—was dug into the grey slate hillside. The tunnel hit geological snags and was still being built when war broke out and the first trains carrying the British Museum treasures arrived in Aberystwyth.

The site was referred to as the Air Raid Precaution tunnel—a name even more prosaic than Dunhuang’s Cave 17—and construction of the £7,000 secret project was finished by October 1939. But before any of the fragile works on vellum, papyri, and paper could be placed inside, atmospheric testing was undertaken. This damp cave in the Welsh hillside lacked the natural climatic advantages of Abbot Wang’s grotto in the arid desert. But it did benefit from cutting-edge technology. It was the United Kingdom’s first experiment in air-conditioned underground storage. Electricity, heating, and ventilation were installed. In case the local power station failed, a hand-operated ventilation system was fitted. After several months of tests, the tunnel was ready to serve its secret purpose.

Printed books and manuscripts were packed into millboard boxes and on August 2, 1940, the first treasures were discreetly carried down Hangman’s Hill and into the tunnel. For nearly three weeks through the long summer days and short nights of that month, material was taken down what is now a track between fields where sheep graze. After nearly a millennium hidden in the Gobi Desert, Stein’s precious manuscripts were once again in a manmade cave.

German troops marched down the Champs Elysees, Hitler stood before the Eiffel Tower and France fell by June 1940. The Nazis had reached Britain’s doorstep and the threat of invasion loomed. Nowhere was considered safe, at least nowhere above ground. Not even the library at Aberystwyth. The tunnel was considered bomb-proof, but anything that could not be housed underground needed to be moved.

The British Museum looked at alternatives. It needed something bigger than the little Welsh tunnel. Eventually a disused stone quarry in Wiltshire (then being used to grow mushrooms) was selected. Boxes and boxes of material were sent from Aberystwyth and elsewhere to Westwood Quarry in 1942. The National Gallery sent its paintings to a former slate mine, Manod Quarry, on a mountain above the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales. There, a road under a railway bridge was lowered to allow Anthony van Dyck’s large
Equestrian Portrait of Charles I
to pass underneath without the monarch losing his head—as he did in life. Meanwhile, the space freed up in the Aberystwyth tunnel was quickly filled with additional material from the British Museum. Leveen updated his boss in June 1942 about what had gone to Westwood Quarry and what was still to be removed. He also listed some documents that were to remain in Aberystwyth. These included Hebrew and Arabic scrolls, mostly illuminated manuscripts, that Leveen planned to work on. But also listed to stay in Wales were Aurel Stein’s scrolls.

Back in London, the British Museum’s galleries had been emptied of their greatest treasures. But when the air raids that had been anticipated failed to materialize, a small show was mounted in August 1940 comprising duplicate antiquities, casts, and models that had been left behind. Staff dubbed it the “suicide exhibition.” But within a month, the intense bombing of London—the Blitz—began. The British capital was targeted for nearly sixty consecutive nights. More than 43,000 people died across Britain in the Luftwaffe air strikes. The Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey all took hits. So, too, did the British Museum.

The museum’s first direct hit, on September 18, 1940, pierced the roof and went through four concrete floors before lodging in a sub-floor. The 2,200-pound bomb was enough to destroy the entire building. Fortunately, it did not explode. Four days later, a smaller bomb hit with uncanny precision; it plummeted through the same hole—again, incredibly, without exploding.

Then devastation arrived. On September 23, at 5:38 a.m., a bomb passed through the roof and floor of the Ethnographic Gallery and exploded in the King’s Library, the room where the Diamond Sutra had been on display. The King’s Library bomb destroyed thirty feet of bookcases and set fire to others. More than 400 volumes were destroyed or damaged beyond repair.

Just a month later, on October 16, an oil bomb hit the building’s magnificent domed Reading Room. Once again the museum was fortunate. Most of the burning oil spilled across the roof’s copper sheeting. Of all the attacks, though, none was more destructive than that on the night of May 10, 1941, when dozens of incendiaries struck the building. Fire spread through many rooms, and more than 200,000 volumes were lost, either destroyed in the flames or damaged by water from fire hoses. By then, the wisdom of removing not just the Diamond Sutra but all the treasures was apparent.

Bombing in World War II, of course, was not one-sided. Berlin alone was subjected to hundreds of air raids. The city’s Ethnological Museum—which held many of the Silk Road objects Albert von Le Coq returned with—was among the buildings damaged in bombing runs launched by the Allies. Some of the largest of Bezeklik’s magnificent murals, which had been permanently attached to the museum’s walls, were reduced to rubble.

Not all the wall paintings the Germans brought from the Silk Road were destroyed. After Berlin fell in 1945, the Russians carried off some of what survived. The fate of the paintings was little known until 2008 when the Hermitage in St. Petersburg displayed a number of them as part of a Silk Road exhibition. The exhibition catalogue obliquely acknowledged that part of the German collection “found itself in the Soviet Union” after World War II.

In the UK, when the war ended, the treasures that had been stored in the Hangman’s Hill tunnel returned to the British Museum and elsewhere. The last load left the tunnel on May 23, 1945, and power was switched off the next day. Today vines tumble over the tunnel’s brick entranceway. Behind its locked metal door, damp has seeped through the arched brick ceiling from which disconnected electrical wires dangle. Long abandoned, the tunnel has been largely forgotten.

Soon after the scrolls he had removed from a manmade cave in the Gobi Desert found refuge in a manmade tunnel in the Welsh hillside, Stein was back in India. Retired from the civil service, he continued to camp in his tent on Mohand Marg during the warm Kashmiri summers. There he enjoyed the solitude to write and walk amid the alpine scenery with the latest Dash by his side. He left, reluctantly, when duty called or the autumn chill arrived. He never ceased his intrepid travels and explorations, including through Swat Valley, coastal Baluchistan, and the Middle East. In his later years, on a tour through the mountainous North-West Frontier region of present-day Pakistan, he was accompanied by a hardy young Pashtun soldier. At the end of the trip, the exhausted man reported on his experience to his military superior: “Stein Sahib is some kind of supernatural being, not human; he walked me off my legs on the mountains; I could not keep up with him. Please do not send me to him again, Sir.” Even in his sixties Stein could tire men half his age. He ventured into Iran four times and, in his mid-seventies, took to the air to survey Iraq.

In the summer of 1943 as war raged in Europe, eighty-year-old Stein was about to fulfill a boyhood dream: to visit Afghanistan. His desire to see the land where Gandharan civilization once flourished and Alexander the Great left his mark had shaped Stein’s life. It was why he took up Oriental studies, why he went to England and why he then went to India. In 1906, he briefly stepped on Afghan soil as he crossed its slender northeast finger on his way to Dunhuang, but repeated attempts to return had been thwarted by bureaucracy and politics over four decades, until an unexpected invitation arrived.

In late September 1943, he left Mohand Marg and stayed a few days in Srinagar with his friend Dr. Ernest Neve, whose late brother had treated Stein’s injured foot decades earlier. On his last evening with Dr. and Mrs. Neve, Stein fainted but had sufficiently recovered by the next morning to leave by truck for Peshawar, near the Afghan border. In Peshawar, once a center of Buddhist learning, he visited a longstanding friend. Without a trace of irony Stein confided to his diary that his friend appeared alert “but his age of 60 shows.” Stein traveled by car from Peshawar to the Afghan capital, Kabul, arriving on Tuesday, October 19. He stayed at the US Legation, hosted by another friend, Cornelius Engert, America’s representative in Kabul. Stein wanted to spend the winter in Helmand Valley, where Alexander the Great had passed, but within days of arriving in Kabul, he caught a chill. He cancelled a trip to the cinema to watch
Desert Victory—
not about the Taklamakan, but World War II and the battle for North Africa. His condition worsened by Sunday evening and he had a stroke. He knew he would not recover and requested a Church of England funeral.

He approached his death without regret. “I have had a wonderful life, and it could not have been concluded more happily than in Afghanistan, which I had wanted to visit for sixty years,” he told Engert. Stein died on the afternoon of October 26, a week after he arrived in Kabul and exactly a month short of his eighty-first birthday.

He was buried in the Christian graveyard in Kabul. Within the mud walls and wooden gate of the cemetery, his grave and those of other foreigners—nineteenth-century soldiers, sixties-era hippies, aid workers and other victims of more recent conflict—have so far survived the ravages of the past decades. His gravestone reads: “A man greatly beloved.” Above it is engraved: “He enlarged the bounds of knowledge.”