Shadow of the Silk Road (16 page)

And you could go mad, I imagined, tracing the origins of the simplest things. The peppers in my pilau would return to India, I fancied, the sesame on my bread to Central Asia. I pictured the onions flying westward off my neighbour’s plate, while his pistachio nuts disappeared to Persia. China, of course, would claim the paper napkins and the rose wilting on the counter; while the complications of iron metallurgy split our cutlery west and east. And what of ourselves, I wondered, our complicated blood (I was sodden with pilau now)? Along the ghost of the Silk Road, among today’s inhabitants, haemoglobin and DNA tests have linked western China by an indelible trail far to the Mediterranean. So who, exactly, was the restaurateur’s green-eyed wife, now clearing away my plate? Perhaps…

But my bus was leaving.

Khotan is the last of the great Uighur towns, solitary on the desert’s edge in a vast, intricately watered oasis. Now that the railway has reached its sister-city, Kashgar, and the Chinese are pouring in, Khotan has become the stronghold and retreat of Uighur purity. As you approach it, and a pale sun comes out, the poplars line the road ten deep against the sand. Here and there, among the mud-built suburbs, a grander house shades its courtyard with a wooden portico, or covers itself in a vine trellis, and mosques with slim-towered gates and crenellated walls stand in the orchards.

In the town centre, the broad Chinese streets soon taper away, and the world belongs to farmers and traders, to women glittering in gold-threaded silk, to gangs of half-employed youths, and cart-drivers with roses behind their ears. Long two-tiered arcades totter above the bazaars, and seem to age prematurely, like the people below, their bright paint fading.

Yet Khotan was once a kingdom. More than two thousand years ago, after it was settled from north-west India, it grew into a luxuriant and sophisticated city-state, famous for its silks, jade and paper. Its citizens were connoisseurs of dance and music, elaborately courteous, and cunning. Chinese travellers wrote with astonishment how these people with deep-set eyes and prominent noses greeted each other by touching one knee to the ground, and how whenever they received a letter they would hold it to their forehead in respect. Their women–to Chinese horror–wore girdles and trousers and rode horses like the men; and an unveiled openness, with rumours of promiscuity, touches them still.

This sensuous and tolerant city was a Buddhist paradise. The monk Xuanzang in the seventh century described its oasis gleaming with scores of monasteries, and rife with miracle. Hermits radiated light from its forests, and statues of the Buddha flew magically by night. In the clefts of the Kun Lun mountains, holy men meditated so intensely that they turned almost to corpses; but their hair kept growing, and they were shaved by visiting shamans.

I found the site of all this ardour and ceremony far from the modern city, deep in the oasis, deserted. Only a huge, shallow depression marked its confines, where nothing was left. A morning
mist drifted over the rice-fields above it, stilling the mud-banks and water-channels in a soft, unreal light, while all around the horizon was closed by an amphitheatre of poplar trees, as if in memorial. I walked between the fields in faint bewilderment. Swarms of tiny frogs teemed at the pool edges. The distance echoed with cuckoos. Here and there some shards of brown pottery had been eased up by the flowing water, and lingered in its runnels. For centuries the city had rotted away under the moist earth–its dampness crumbling wood and clay-brick together–and the soil was leached for treasure by the local inhabitants again and again.

Only hardy fragments survived: pottery figurines and seals, and the thousands of flakes of leaf-gold which had covered palaces and temples. But these leftovers were startling in their diversity: engraved wind-deities and sun-chariots, griffins and coins bearing Indian symbols on one side, Chinese on the other. Hellenised Buddhist statues mingled with signs of Nestorian Christianity and Zoroaster. Mustachioed Indian heads were washed up alongside Roman intaglios. Strangest, perhaps, and still unexplained, were the hordes of lewd little terracotta monkeys–real monkeys were unknown here–which mimicked human activity in all its domestic variety: nursing babies, feasting, playing flutes, copulating, clashing cymbals.

But now this strained and sifted earth was at last at peace. The loudspeakers promoting family planning in a faraway village were drowned out by the pipe of wagtails. The mist never lifted, but hung as if painted, over a painted desolation. It was impossible to tell the limits of the city. But somewhere under my feet, in a fourteen-day ceremony, monastic floats like rolling temples had once carried their carved Buddhas and devas suspended in gold and silver, and the king and his women had emerged barefoot from the city gate to meet them, and prostrated themselves, and strewed the earth with flowers. Only in the tenth century, after bitter wars with Islamic Kashgar, did the kingdom fall; then the Mongols came, and the earth crept over it.

Perhaps it was the city’s disappearance, mulched by the oasis waters, which turned my mind to the preserving desert. But a day’s
march into the sands, I knew, a lonely relic of the kingdom had survived: a great Buddhist stupa discovered by Aurel Stein over a century ago. I found a jobless guide who had once been there, a Uighur woman who knew where to hire a Land-Rover and camels. Gul had once been handsome, and even now, in middle age, her eyes glittered vivid under strong brows, and she dressed for the desert as if for a party.

For an hour we drove over grasslands beyond the oasis, until we came to brushwood shelters disintegrating round a well. No one was in sight. A misted sun lit up the desert beyond. Then, from far away, out of the scrub-speckled dunes, a herdsman came driving camels–huge, moulted beasts with lax humps and chewed ears–and an hour later we were swaying through the May heat into a purer wilderness. Perched on felt blankets lashed over a wooden frame, I watched the salinated scrublands thin away. The sun–a frosted lamp when we set out–burnt away the haze and blazed down over amber dunes crumpled to the horizon. Ahead of me the camel-driver rode in silence, and Gul, under a white sunhat sashed in muslin, her skirts overlapping leather boots, sat her beast delicately and fanned herself with a lilac handkerchief.

Around us was utter silence. The camels’ plate-like feet went noiseless over the sand. Only the saddle-packs beneath us, where the beasts’ humps drooped like empty bags, creaked in uneasy rhythm with their stride. All about us the dunes were scored with concentric ripples, as if a giant comb had been run down them, and flowed together in a sculptural peace. But here and there, where water lay deep underground, a red willow blew, or a tamarisk tree sent up a tangle of startling green, clotted by hawks’ nests, and over the lifeless-seeming sands a snake or lizard had left its feathery track.

Then a weird delusion gathered. Far into the distance, the slopes and valleys of the intersecting dunes, and the punctuation mark of tamarisks, started the fantasy that a landscape of hedged fields and hamlets had been petrified here long ago, and that we were riding through a once-Arcadian land. Momentarily I could believe the Uighur legend that this was anciently a country of lakes and cities. Taklamakan–Gul called back to me–might in Uighur mean
‘homeland’, and its civilisation was said to have drowned in a great hurricane which raged for forty-nine days. Now they called it ‘the Sea of Death’.

Our way grew emptier, starker. The tamarisks disintegrated into bleached twigs like chicken bones, littering the humps where they had stood. The pulverised gravel along the dunes glinted with quartz. Into this wilderness the camels pushed easily, as if padding back into prehistory. Rearing in front of me, my beast’s wrinkled neck had moulted upward to the mauve crown of its head, tufted with leftover auburn curls, like the skulls of the Cherchen mummies.

Suddenly the camel-driver pointed–‘Rawak!’–and we all squinted into the glare. A mile away, perhaps, paler than the pale sands around it, a building shone in isolation. The tributary that nourished it had long ago gone underground, and its oasis disappeared, leaving this champagne-coloured sanctuary to disrupt the desert with its tiers of etiolated brick. Even in decay, it was gracefully simple: a circular shrine mounted on a star-shaped base, ascended on four sides by tapering stairways.

As we drew close, a broken drum rose from the debris of its terraces, its cupola crashed in, and the rectangle of an enclosing rampart undulated over the sand. We passed the brushwood hut of its watchman, who had gone, and our camels slumped to their knees.

We walked through the walls by a vanished gate. The whole enceinte was half drowned under the dunes, which overflowed the ramparts or poured through their breaches. Above me the stupa too was blurred by coagulated sand, and its stairways crumbled; but its upper tiers shook clear in bulwarks of creamy brick, and pushed their bright, domeless cylinder into the sky.

It was along the half-buried courtyard, in 1901, that Stein uncovered more than ninety giant statues. In this stoneless land they had been moulded of stucco around wooden frames: Buddhas and Bodhisattvas looming over life size from the walls, their heavy heads–many had fallen–gazing downward through sleepy, almond eyes. The drip of their robes, moulded to the bodies’ contours, betrayed the Greek heritage that had emanated out from
the upper Indus, conquered by Alexander six hundred years before.

But the wood inside them had rotted away; they were thinned to shells, impossible to transport. Reluctantly Stein covered them over again–it was eerily like a human burial, he wrote–but within a few years they had been disinterred and smashed by Chinese jade-diggers, seeking treasure. Since then the dunes had shifted and re-formed; above half the walls they towered to thirty feet, burying whatever artefacts remained.

As I scrambled beneath the north-east wall, where traces of a parapet eased clear, I glimpsed patches of the white-painted stucco which had once coated the whole shrine; and here against the smoothed rampart I uncovered, with trembling hands, the gutted torso of a statue. Gul and the herdsman were resting near the camels, and nobody shared with me this furtive violation. The figure was startlingly vulnerable. The sand fell from it at my touch, and I saw that its head had gone. It was a curved and fluted husk, in red clay, painted pale pink. I could feel with my fingers the rough descent of its lower robes under the dune’s surface. Then I covered it up again, and heaped sand even over my footprints. The day had cooled. A wind was droning in the stupa’s crevices, and the desert now shimmering with a veil of floating sand.

When I returned to Gul, she was anxious to start back. The camels were busy chewing the thatch from the watchman’s hut. Their prehistoric heads on bald necks, and their long double-eyelashes, proof against sandstorms, gave them the look of seductive reptiles. As we mounted, they stooped forward with odd, whimpering honks, then lurched angrily to their feet. Their poorly trussed packs slithered askew and first the herdsman, then Gul, were thrown to the ground. For a minute Gul lay doubled up, groaning. I clambered down and stood uncertainly above her. Then she started to whimper, clutching her left breast. Something soft landed on my shoulder–a gob of green cud spat by her camel–as I bent down to hold her. She breathed, ‘I’m all right, I’m all right.’ But beneath her torn jacket I noticed the thick-padded bra of a mastectomy. She was not hurt, but frightened. And the next
moment she had shaken herself free of the sand, ashamed, and was upbraiding the camel.

Gingerly, after tightening girths, we started home through the weakening sunlight, following our own tracks. Behind us the stupa glimmered back into the desert, as if we had imagined it. An hour later the sun had set, and some suffocated stars came out. The wind sharpened and stirred the sand along the dune-crests, and by the time we had returned, all traces of our coming were smoothed away.

‘People are afraid now. They saw the Iraq war and the World Trade Center on television–every peasant has a television–and they feel America or China might do anything.’ But Gul disowns this fear. In the half-darkness her smile ignites her fallen face, and she is handsome again. ‘Normally the peasants only watch two channels–kung fu and sport. They just want to be left alone. They never felt anything about al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein. It all seems far away to us.’

We are sitting on one of the wooden divans, in a suburban alley, where bakers are browning enormous meat pies. A cavalcade of donkey-carts is going home. We gnaw our pies and look out through the night on the weak-lit street, whose trees are slung with banners for birth control.

‘But the peasants can’t read,’ she says. ‘To them the banners are just decoration.’

She slips off her protective headscarf, and notices my faint surprise. ‘Nobody cares. We aren’t really an Islamic people, not deeply. If you came into the countryside at night, you’d find the peasants drunk on the roadside. They drink secretly–Ili wine, mostly. Even the women drink a homemade rose or pomegranate brew, and get red cheeks.’ She laughs airily. ‘We may seem devout, but it’s not so.’

In the cluttered street, where the women dangle their legs from the passing carts, and the drivers flick their whips, Gul seems to belong to another race. Her torn jacket is smartly buttoned again, and her hair falls shoulder-length. Her eyes glint with a hardy fatalism.

‘Khotan is full of prostitutes now–Chinese peasant women from Sichuan and Hunan, who only know how to sleep with people. They even turn up at religious festivals, anywhere men come without their wives.’ She shifts in anger. ‘We Khotan women are said to be promiscuous too. It’s an old idea–there are a lot of yellow stories about us.’ She glances at her torn jacket, checking. ‘But in fact we’re afraid about our husbands now, because everything’s changed. Twelve years ago my sister divorced because her husband had an affair. Now it’s common, and everyone endures it. But we wouldn’t tolerate the Islamic alternative, men having four wives, even if we needed help in the house.’ She discards her pie and spits gristle into her hand, angry about something I cannot tell. ‘Even during my illness, my husband never did a thing.’