Journeys on the Silk Road (8 page)

The funeral was set for the next day, the day of Stein’s departure. Stein delayed his start so he could attend. But in Kashgar, even the rituals of death assumed a leisurely air. The local carpenter was in no hurry to finish making the coffin when Macartney and Stein arrived at his shop on the morning of the funeral. There they found the Russian consul, who had taken charge of the burial arrangements, waiting impatiently for the coffin that should have been finished the previous evening. As the hours passed with little progress, the coffin was eventually completed with the aid of the consul’s Cossacks. Around noon, Stein, together with Kashgar’s few European residents, followed the empty coffin as it was carried through the dusty lanes to Father Hendricks’ shabby home where the Chinese shoemaker convert had kept vigil. The tiny place was crammed with books, maps and the priest’s altar, beside which was a trapdoor leading to his wine cellar. It resembled, Stein said, “a cave by the seashore where the play of the waves had deposited strange debris from distant coasts.”

The Cossacks eased the priest’s body into the coffin and, bareheaded in the midday heat, carried it to the Christian graveyard about a mile away, between the river and Chini Bagh. The Russian consulate guard marched in front of the coffin and the rest of Kashgar’s Europeans behind, though they were not the only people to mourn the much-loved priest. For months after Hendricks’ death, Chinese friends kept a light burning nightly on his grave.

4

The Moon and the Mail

Stein passed beyond Chini Bagh’s avenue of poplars late in the hot afternoon a few hours after Father Hendricks was laid to rest. The heat in late June was so intense—with temperatures of 105 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade—he and his caravan traveled mostly by night. They would set off well before dawn, usually around 2 a.m., and cover up to twenty-five miles before the sun forced them to seek refuge. Sleeping in a tent during the day was impossible, so Stein reluctantly slept under more solid shelter. It wasn’t just the dirt that bothered him in the Chinese rest houses, but the inquisitive caretakers and other travelers who gave him little peace as he attempted to rest, attend to his caravan and read the remaining proofs of his book—a task unfinished in Kashgar. The buildings were also almost as hot as his tent since they faced the midday sun.

He soon availed himself of the local rules of hospitality among the oases which allowed him to lodge pretty much wherever he liked. “One may invade the house of any one, high or low, sure to find a courteous reception, whether the visit is expected or otherwise.” He stayed with well-to-do villagers, enjoying their orchards where the trees, heavy with apricots and mulberries, splattered the ground with their ripe fruit.

These were the first days of their long journey together, but Chiang was already proving a worthy companion. As the caravan moved along in the pre-dawn light, Chiang began to teach Stein some Mandarin. The explorer, with his ear for languages, picked it up quickly. He also picked up Chiang’s strong Hunan accent. But at least they could talk together in a language other than Chiang’s impenetrable Turki. Stein found Chiang a ready source of gossip and amusing anecdotes, a keen observer of human foibles. “He has told me many little secrets of the official machinery of the chequered careers of proud Ambans & their unholy profits. ‘The New Dominions’ are a sort of India for Chinese officials, where everybody knows everybody else,” Stein wrote.

Chiang’s dress was as colorful as his stories. He wore either a dark blue or maroon silk jacket, which he teamed with bright yellow overalls when he rode on horseback. On his pigtailed head he added a light blue silk cloth under his traveling cap to shield him from the heat, and he shaded his eyes with a detachable peak of rainbow-colored paper. Even his black horse had colorful flourishes. Atop its saddle Chiang placed a vivid scarlet cushion, and the saddle itself had leather flaps decorated with yellow and green embroidery. But Chiang’s preference for heavy old-fashioned stirrups worried Stein. “I never could look at this heavy horse millinery and the terribly massive stirrups, each weighing some three pounds and of truly archaic type, without feeling sorrow for his mount,” Stein noted. Consequently, Stein gave Chiang the hardiest of the horses.

Chiang had planned to set out with an alarming amount of baggage, including most of his library, but was convinced to leave much behind. As he became accustomed to desert travel, he willingly began to shed more. He took to rough travel with gusto, showing an indifference to its hardships. He even shared Stein’s curiosity about the past. Certainly Chiang was a far cry from the pugnacious, womanizing interpreter who had accompanied Stein’s first Turkestan expedition. “It was a piece of real good fortune which gave me in Chiang, not merely an excellent teacher and secretary, but a devoted helpmate ever ready to face hardships for the sake of scientific interests,” he wrote. “With all his scholarly interests in matters of a dead past, he proved to have a keen eye also for things and people of this world, and his ever-ready flow of humorous observations lightened many a weary hour for us both.”

After some hard bargaining in the oasis of Yarkand, where Chiang had long worked, Stein secured for himself a fine young horse he named Badakhshi after what he believed were its bloodlines from Badakhshan. Clearly Stein spent no more time naming his horse than he did his dynasty of dogs. Badakhshi was to prove a perfect mount for Stein and for Dash II, who taught himself to leap to the stirrup and then up to the saddle, where he would sit on the pommel. Badakhshi was hardy and unsociable, not unlike his master.

Stein was at last doing exactly what he loved. He was on the move in Turkestan, where he felt more at home than almost anywhere; certainly more so than in India—despite living almost twenty years there—with its caste rules and stultifying bureaucracy. As his camels, his ponies and his men moved steadily along, in the same way travelers had done for centuries, he could forget for a while the modern world with its bustle of speeding trains and alienating cities. “To peep into every house & hut along the road is better than to see towns in electric illumination flit past like fireflies,” he wrote.

He loved the sense of being transported to an earlier era. And that feeling recurred when he encountered a caravan of traders heading over the mountains to Ladakh. He entrusted their jovial leader with a letter to a friend there and felt cheered to be reminded that long-distance communication was possible well before the existence of a postal service. The traders’ cargo was likely to transport in an altogether different way; it consisted of “that precious but mischievous” drug
charas,
or hashish.

Only his relationship with the elder Ram Singh intruded on the joy of returning to his Turkestan. The surveyor had become unaccountably sullen. This reached a peak when, as the caravan was readying to depart one morning before dawn, the surveyor sent a message to say he was not prepared to move unless he was given a couple of assistants of his own. When Stein went to see him, the surveyor had other complaints. Among them, he did not want to start at such an early hour, even though it was when Stein often broke camp. Stein did not know what precipitated the surveyor’s demands and was not about to acquiesce to them. Instead, he criticized Ram Singh for setting a bad example.

Stein was impatient with delays. When a rare late start was made, he grumbled about his men’s reluctance to tear themselves away from the “fleshpots” of a local oasis. For Stein it was the desert, not the oases, that attracted him. One night during his first expedition, he became entranced watching the full moon ascend over the desert.

She looked as if rising from the sea when first emerging from the haze of dust that hid the plains, and her light shimmered on the surface. But when she climbed high up in the sky it was no longer a meek reflection that lit up the plain below. It seemed as if I were looking at the lights of a vast city lying below me in the endless plains. Could it really be that terrible desert where there was no life and no hope of human existence? I knew that I should never see it again in this alluring splendour.

Now, six years on and under another full moon, he was back in the desert whose terrifying beauty haunted him. He camped amid the rolling dunes beside a Muslim shrine inhabited by thousands of sacred pigeons to whom grateful travelers made offerings. The shrine was near what Stein called “my kingdom” of Khotan, once the center of a Buddhist civilization. He was intrigued by its legend. Locals said the birds were the descendants of a pair of doves that had sprung from the heart of a Muslim martyr killed as his army battled Khotan’s Buddhist infidels. But to Stein, the tale recalled a similar, though much older legend encountered by Xuanzang as he journeyed through the kingdom. In this version, the sacred animals weren’t birds but rats—giant rodents the size of hedgehogs with hair of gold and silver—and they had saved Khotan’s Buddhist king from invading Huns by chewing through the enemy’s leather armor and harnesses in the night. Stein suspected that with the spread of Islam through the region, the Buddhist rats had evolved into Muslim birds. The legend had been appropriated rather than eliminated. It was the sort of cultural shape-shifting that appealed to Stein. It also suggested that beneath the Muslim surface were the remains of an earlier Buddhist mythology.

Whatever the basis of the story, some help for the journey ahead wouldn’t go astray. Stein’s men had brought along extra grain for the pigeons and they insisted he, too, pay homage. While the caravan was getting ready before dawn, Stein entered the wooden sheds where the birds were nesting. Carefully avoiding crushing any eggs, he scattered grain for the fluttering birds. His offerings would be richly rewarded.

Stein’s sights were set on two places far across the desert. He wanted to find the mysterious settlement of Loulan that Sven Hedin had discovered in 1899. Amid the ruined buildings of the ancient Chinese garrison town, Hedin had uncovered fragments of early paper, wooden documents, and Buddhist images. One of these, a fragment made between AD 150 and 200, was then the world’s oldest known piece of paper and the earliest example of handwriting on paper. Hedin had observed that the door to one house stood open just as it had when it was abandoned 1,500 years earlier.

Beyond Loulan was Dunhuang and the painted caves, but all of these would have to wait for winter. Only then would it be safe to cross that part of the desert, and it would require a resourceful method to overcome the lack of water. Stein’s more immediate goal was to travel southeast from Kashgar to the Kunlun Shan, the vast mountain range on the northern border of the Tibetan plateau. There he would undertake surveying work before returning to the desert in the cooler weather. Mapping in this region was politically sensitive and dangerous. Some servants of the Raj went to extraordinary lengths to carry out their clandestine activities. Several Indian surveyors disguised themselves as Tibetan pilgrims and carried specially adapted prayer wheels and Buddhist rosary beads. The number of beads was reduced from the traditional 108 to 100 so the surveyors could easily count their steps. They recorded their tally on tiny paper scrolls which they hid inside the hollow prayer wheels, some of which also contained compasses. James Bond’s Q could hardly have developed a more ingenious solution.

Stein never adopted such a disguise himself. He left behind his camels and some of his men and headed into the Kunlun Mountains in August 1906. With its bluebells and edelweiss the alpine landscape was a verdant relief after the barren desert and recalled his beloved Kashmir. Surrounded by snow-capped peaks, he found an idyllic camp where he could put the final touches to his book about his first expedition. As he continued through the mountains, Stein was eager to solve a mystery more than forty years old. It concerned the difficult and long-abandoned route by which British surveyor William Johnson crossed from Leh to Khotan in 1865. Stein had been puzzled by discrepancies between Johnson’s hand-drawn sketch and the topography of the mountains. Despite the existence of the sketch, local hill men denied knowledge of such a path. Stein suspected such denials stemmed from a fear that rediscovery would expose the inhabitants to unwanted intruders. He had tried to determine the route during his first expedition without success, and once again he was unable to do so.