Shadow of the Silk Road (12 page)

But their children each had a small, tentative foothold in the new world. Gwelin had bought his ramshackle van second-hand, and was making freelance trips. His sister taught singing in the local primary school–no longer revolutionary anthems, she laughed, but traditional songs, which the children sang with fervour. She had a perfect, heart-shaped face, eventless and pretty. Did children sing in England? she wondered.

But their brother was a slothful giant–six foot five inches, I guessed. How his frail parents had bred such a man was unimaginable. His curly hair dribbled round a baby face. He played basketball for Zhangye–that was his job, he said, although the money was lousy. He never took his eyes from me, simply gazed under leaden lids with a bemused smile. It was as if the sleeping Buddha of Zhangye had lumbered to his feet, wearing a tracksuit.

All the time we were talking, the mother and grandmother replenished our cups of weak tea, and seemed interchangeable, smiling shy, worn smiles, so that I wanted to embrace them. But the father sat hopelessly in his silence, his shoes split, his hands clasped between his knees. His eyes barely left the brick-paved floor. I tried to speak with him, stumbling into platitudes which were really saying: your wife is good, you have reared three promising children, you have a home, take heart. But he answered me only with quick, watery stares, as if I were unbridgeably far away. At the age of sixty, he seemed long ago redundant. China itself was slipping away from him.

As the train curled west to Jiayuguan, easing toward the head of the Gansu corridor, the snowline of the Qilian mountains, which for hours had hung disconnected in the sky, began to close in. The nearer slopes were tissued with dry water-courses, faintly edged by scrub. Then hard, glacial peaks materialised out of the haze. For a hundred miles they lurched and barged together before drifting away into soot-coloured foothills, while to the north-east low violet ridges melted to Mongolia and the sky.

Yet even this desert was being disrupted. Sometimes a crane stuck up out of the sand, or a lorry crossed the emptiness. Pipes were being laid, drainage dug. The drifting line which I had thought was mist turned out to be streaming from a cement factory under the mountains. The faintest intrusion here–a gravel pit, a track–left its scars and stains for ever. No wind blurred them with loose sand, no plants devoured them.

In my low-class carriage, stinking of smoke and urine, half the passengers were wearing anti-SARS masks. Solitary, alien, I was engulfed by their intense, unblinking gaze, as if a huge operating-theatre team was wondering what to do with me. I could not tell if the masked mouths were smiling or scowling. Sombrely dressed men in army fatigue trousers, their hair tousled under peasant caps, they sat above aisles of spittle and discarded bottle-tops. Ranks of string bags and washrags swayed on the hooks above
them, and the racks overhead groaned with their merchandise. Sometimes they removed their masks to spit and shout in genial badinage, or picnic on dry cakes and bottled tea.

And slowly the questions came. Why was I here? How much did I earn? Where was my work unit? And suddenly, from an eager youth: why had Britain fought against Iraq? My answers were shifting, sometimes apologetic. The old woman beside me dropped a bag of apples on my lap and fell asleep.

We idled to a halt in Jiuquan–where it is said the first rhubarb was grown–and for a while I could not recall why the town’s name troubled me. Then I remembered the tale of Bento de Goes, the Jesuit lay brother–he was five years on the road between India and Beijing–who was cheated of his money and died here destitute in 1607. His remains lay somewhere under the wheatfields and run-down factories. Even now this is the kind of death–not by sickness, but by heartlessness–that sends a chill through travellers’ bones.

As we lurched into motion again, a young woman pulled out a tray from her luggage and started selling chewing-gum around the carriage. Within a minute the railway police found her. Her voice scuttled up an octave in sing-song pleading, but the officers led her away, and we didn’t see her again. Half an hour later, beyond a desert glazed with grey stones, the old frontier post of Jiayuguan appeared, and dusk was stealing in from the east.

From my empty hotel, slung with banners proclaiming it sterilised from SARS, I bicycled out at dawn towards ‘The First Pass under Heaven’. Here, in 1372, the Ming built a fortress on the site which already, for nearly a thousand years, had marked the end of the Great Wall, and of ancestral China. Now the once-bare miles were littered with factories, and the fort was edged by a barren park and artificial lake.

But its ramparts still carved a harsh geometry above the desert. Their raked walls and heavy crenellations shone flax-pale in the young light. Their entranceways were vaulted tunnels where my footsteps echoed. Yet over each gate a pagoda tower fluttered up, like a leftover toy, in tiers of scarlet columns and tilted roofs.

Then the weight and mass of the inner fortress crowded in. Its iron-belted gates were folded ajar, but there was nobody in sight, and no sound. The SARS virus had frozen travel. Above the gateways the turrets’ beams were painted with scenes of rural peace, but beneath them the fort turned grimly functional. In the dog-leg baileys attackers would be mown down from walls which loomed vertically for forty feet on all sides. Wide ramps mounted to parapets which became highways for cavalry, five abreast. The entrance tunnels ran thirty-five yards deep.

I roamed the parapets in the desert’s silence. To the north rose the tormented Black Mountains; to the south the Qilian massif floated like an astral ice-field; while between them the last of the Great Wall came stumbling in, broken, after its two-thousand-mile journey from the Pacific. It crossed the plain in chunks of tamped earth, then heaved itself round the ramparts under my feet, before meandering south to seal the pass under the mountain snows.

But to north and west the desert opened in a tremendous camel-coloured void. A creamy mist dissolved it into the sky. This was the barbarian hinterland that haunted the Chinese imagination through centuries of chronic war. The early annals groan with battles fought against the shifting sea of nomads, as if against some elemental fate, and contemporary poetry throbs with the lament of princesses wedded to Hunnish chiefs as the price of peace. The frontiers are forever scattered with bleached bones, while back in the homeland the women are mounting watch-towers among the lingering swallows, to scan the horizon for their returning men.

The western gate of Jiayuguan, the Gate of Sorrows, leads out into this wilderness. This was the ‘mouth’ of China. To be ‘within the mouth’ was to belong to civilisation. To be ejected was to wander a hopeless limbo. Down its tunnel the flagstones are worn with exiles’ feet. Its ramp lifts to the empty sky and the empty desert. People went out into terror. There they would be buried in forgotten graves, among the unquiet demons, and Buddhists were condemned for ever to barbarian incarnations. Beyond the hairy, milk-drinking nomads, fantastical creatures took wing: hominids with triple bodies and eyes in their chests, human-headed leopards and quadrupeds that howled like dogs.

Even in the twentieth century the tunnel walls were carved with farewell verses scratched by shamed officials as they exchanged their sedan chairs for carts or camels. And with them, as late as the last dynasty, common convicts trudged westward with their whole families in tow, their foreheads tattooed in black characters, without hope of return.

As a true bulwark the Wall was senseless. Huns, Mongols, Manchus overswept it almost at will. The Sinologist Owen Lattimore proposed that it was built to keep the Chinese in rather than the nomads out. Perhaps, unwittingly, it was less a physical defence than a monstrous definition. It separated civilisation from barbarism, light from darkness. It was an act of shuddering denial:
over there is not what we are.
And it was steeped in fear. Dead men were immured along its length to ward off the spirits ravening out of the desert. As the Russians discharged their condemned to Siberia, so the Chinese cast into their hinterland all the waste of the Celestial Empire: the dissident, the criminal, even the unwise. And so they purified themselves.

Thus the wilderness into which Lao-tzu rode his black buffalo took up residence in the Chinese unconscious as a symbol for mortality. They believed that all their gods lived in walled cities like them, and in walled palaces. Among these the God of Walls and Moats was the god of death. He whispered to people when they must pass through.

Yet though the fear remained, the frontier was often no restraint. In times of imperial expansion the Chinese flooded far beyond it. The scattered chain of a Han dynasty rampart still stretches three hundred miles to the Wall’s west. At such times the exiled convicts became agricultural slaves, or worked imperial mines beyond the Wall, and disgraced officials took up distant posts on probation. In other centuries, when China began to fail, the feared desert rushed in not to destroy but to replenish it. Like the half-mystic Yellow Emperor, its great unifying dynasties–the founding Qin, the Sui, the Tang, the Yuan–were not Chinese in origin at all, but came in clouds of dust out of the barbarian north and west.

Here at Jiayuguan, where the Great Wall ended, the fabled isolation of China fell apart. The desert breathed a countervailing promise. Somewhere beyond the fiend-ridden distances was a mountain paradise where the Queen Mother of the West presided over a garden of immortals; and as the first caravans departed with their bolts of pale silk and yarn, traders began returning with wares whose origins were unexplained. For centuries China and the West continued in ignorance of one another. Just as the Romans, familiar with cotton, imagined that silk grew on trees, so the Chinese, deducing from the silkworm, imagined that cotton must emanate from an animal. So they dreamt up the ‘Vegetable Lamb’, a creature which sprouted from the soil where it grazed secretly at night, and produced cotton-bearing young. To the Romans the faraway Chinese were a gentle, blessed people, and at the same time, vague at first, rumours in China spread of a powerful elective monarchy beyond Persia whose citizens were honest and at peace.

It was no longer a frontier. China extended more than a thousand miles beyond. As my bus plunged westward and Jiayuguan sank into the desert, I felt a raw anticipation. We were moving into somewhere starker, less predictable. Sometimes the desert smoothed to unblemished dunes. More often it crumpled like a rough sea, strewn with pebbles or speckled by camel-thorn, whose million sprays each gathered to itself an islet of sand.

I sat wedged among storekeepers from oasis villages, and became involved in debate about the prices of things–I could rarely remember them–which must have been the staple of the Silk Road always, so that for a long time I did not notice the darkening sky. But outside, the visibility had shrunk to a hundred yards through an air blurred with sand. A premature dusk seemed to be falling. Yet there was no wind. During the next seven hours Han dynasty beacon towers loomed and faded in ruined silhouette, and we passed the ancient site of the Jade Gate. Once a sand-clogged seventeenth-century town hovered out of the twilight, abandoned. And once the bus was flagged down where local officials, alerted to the SARS virus, had set up their desks in a
disused garage. Everybody clambered out to receive thermometers under their armpits, and fill in forms about where they were going and where they had been, while figures in white materialised out of the sand-blackened air to spray the bus with disinfectant. The passengers had donned masks now, not only against the disease, I fancied, but against the airborne sand, and the closing void itself. For a long time we waited, muffled, by the roadside. Over the pot-holed tarmac, where the highway of the world had once shuffled with thousand-strong camel trains, the headlights of a lone lorry came and went.

Two hours later, under a lightening sky, the oasis of Dunhuang assembled in a mist of green out of the sand. Its town looked small and lost. Its lifeblood was travellers, and the travellers had gone. In my hotel the symptoms of SARS were bannered in warning across the empty foyer: dry coughs, malaise, headaches, muscle fatigue–but they were all afflictions which routinely accompany travel in China. In a restaurant that night I sat alone, except for a small girl with an outsize guitar, who strummed me songs of welcome in a squeaky, charmless voice, and looked about to cry.

A slender river is the cause of the miracle, running from the hills into nowhere. You drive out of Dunhuang over a bitter plain, pocked only with graves. The hills make desolate wrinkles against the whitened sky. Then, after ten miles, Dunhuang’s stream reappears under an arc of cliffs which drop over a hundred feet beneath ridges of drifted sand. Poplars and willows crowd its bed, and the mouths of the Buddhist grottoes–three, four tiers deep–darken the rock-face for over a mile. There are almost five hundred of them. Since the fourth century
AD
, when a monk wandering these hills saw a vision of Buddhas blazing in the cliffs, monastic communities had burrowed through the soft stone and painted its darkness with their faith.

Even then the oasis was a lodestar for merchants. Here the Silk Road forked westward, skirting the terrible Taklamakan desert north and south on fifteen-hundred-mile tracks to the Pamir mountains. Whichever route the merchants took, they converged
on Dunhuang to amass supplies, hire guides, buy camels. From the southern branch pilgrims might diverge from the Taklamakan over the Karakoram into India, and another track cut through Dunhuang north–south, linking Siberia with Tibet. Of all the Silk Road passages, the Taklamakan was the most dreaded, and in these cave sanctuaries travellers petitioned the monks to pray for their souls, or offered gifts in thanksgiving for their return.

The place was almost empty now. The cliffs were shored up by rough-plastered stone, threaded with walkways. A guide took me round alone. The antechambers of many temples had collapsed through erosion, and we entered their inner sanctuaries straight out of the sunlight, shedding fifteen centuries at a footstep. The painted figures massed over the walls shone in the powdered minerals of their first creation–malachite green, ochre, lapis lazuli–while above them the coffered ceilings flowered down in radial brilliance, as if from the apex of a giant tent. The influences of China, India, Central Asia, even Persia, jostled and interfused. Only a red pigment, often used for skin colour, had oxidised black, so that the naked Indian Bodhisattvas had coarsened to a
danse macabre
of charred waists and black breasts swaying under white-slashed eyes and crowns. Sometimes, in the background of the Buddha’s incarnations, a routine trade and domesticity were going on: a farmer stabling his horses, a woman putting on makeup, some cocks fighting across a rooftop. Still other walls were carpeted with hundreds of miniature Buddhas. And sometimes the chapel’s donors processed along the lower tiers, humble in the earlier caves, but later proud in Tang silks and jewels, with high waists and phoenix headdresses dangling pearls, their whole retinue behind them.