Shadow of the Silk Road (18 page)

Were it not for the plight of his people, I would think him overacting, perhaps an agent provocateur. But his fury is old. He carries it like a virtue. ‘They want to brainwash us. In school we’re forced to learn Chinese, just like black slaves learnt English. A foreign language! An imposter!’ He glances round the tables, but they are filled only by Uighurs celebrating. ‘They create jobs, yes, then they fill them themselves. You’ll never find a Uighur in a decent job. Even in the army–a lieutenant, yes, a captain maybe. But nothing higher. We’re the cannon-fodder. My brother got out years ago. He went into the army in Russia–he was in rockets, secret stuff–and got promoted under Dudayev, the Chechen general in Moscow, before Dudayev turned on the Russians. We’re brothers, you know, the Chechens and Uighurs, and the Uzbeks and the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz.’ He lifts his arms. ‘All Turkish brothers!’

I mutter: ‘Yes…’ But this is a frail identity. For centuries the Uighur had related more fiercely to their separate oases than to any notional state. The very name Uighur, ironically, after resurrection in the thirties, had been enforced by Communist Beijing, inadvertently handing its bearers a nationality. Above all, perhaps, it is hatred of the oppressor which has turned this scattered and diluted people into a tentative nation.

‘This is a dead place,’ the man says. ‘Kazakhstan isn’t wonderful–I’ll take a factory job–but it’s better than here. Freedom’s a delusion here. You speak your mind and…’ He draws his hand across his throat. ‘But if we decided, we could throw them out!’ He fires an imaginary rifle with bitter glee. ‘Yes!’

‘No,’ I say. ‘There are too many.’

‘We could do it! Perhaps America would help us. It’s the same as Iraq here, the suppression. They’d come to our aid…and the British…’

I think he has forgotten my nationality. I feel ashamed. ‘No…’

A sense of hopelessness descends on me. Rebellions and riots have erupted here ever since the Communist takeover in 1949, and the Chinese response has always been ruthless: mass arrests, indoctrination courses, public executions, and the disappearance of thousands of suspects into labour reform camps. In the 1990s, especially, after neighbouring Central Asian states gained independence, the tension had heightened; and since the attack on the World Trade Center the United States–in a political windfall for Beijing–had condemned the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement, for acts the movement largely disowned.

The restaurant is closing down. A matt-haired man has hovered up behind us and is listening. A wiry beard dribbles from his cheeks, and under his creased and recessed brows two myopic eyes glimmer out.

For the first time my companion looks nervous. ‘Chinese KGB,’ he murmurs. He stares back at the man, who does not move.

‘He’s just a farmer,’ I say.

‘He’s Chinese. That’s what they look like, the Chinese KGB. I tell you. I know. They’re peasants.’

The man retires, still watching us through small, perplexed eyes. But my companion has stood up and is leaving. ‘I told you.’ He is shaking with anger or fear, I cannot tell. Now I too am shivering inside, as if a cold draught was blowing in. ‘They have no souls.’

Threading the giant oasis in his old, nursed taxi, Osman carried me to graveyards and shrines and lonely
mazars
, the tombs of holy men. His head was full of wonders. He knew caves where spiders had woven webs to protect Muslim pilgrims hiding there, and a place where cornfields had turned to stone to starve unbelievers. But he had aged into poignant sympathies. He slowed down before every sick tree with tender outrage–the walnuts and
mulberries were diseased this year–and once he swerved into an irrigation ditch to avoid a hoopoe pecking in the road. He would have liked me to become a Muslim, I think, and made me repeat
There is no God but God
, as if its incantatory power might work some good.

But the shrines we entered were rife with heresy. In a great cemetery–a dust-sea of graves on the desert’s edge–the flags and headstones teemed with shamanic tridents and Buddhist wheels. An official Chinese notice labelled this a historical place, and so protected–and cauterised–but it was crammed with the recent dead, and long belief.

At the holiest of these sites, the tomb of Imam Asmu, it was a time of festival, Osman said, but the Chinese had warned away worshippers because of the SARS epidemic. We travelled through sad fields. The mulberry trees had sickened to reddish tufts along their ditches, and the sand was blowing in. Our track ended at a copse of date palms on the desert’s edge. A storm was scything over the dunes. In other years, Osman said, the path was lined by beggars and
abdals
–dervishes rumoured to wander under a curse–and pilgrims would feed them raisins. Now only a single ancient in rags, his eyes ice-blue, sightless, lifted a wasted Mongolian face to us, and washed his hands over his cheeks in blessing as we passed. Then Osman’s feet slowed in the sand. The grave was over there, he said–he gestured across the dunes–but he would not go on.

The Chinese fear these
mazars
as seedbeds of revolt. Their rumoured dead are Muslim warriors martyred in battle a thousand years ago, fighting the Buddhist infidels of Khotan and buried where they fell. But their true age is unknown. Imam Asmu, said Osman as I left him, had been killed by a poisoned spear in the eleventh century.

At first I could see nothing as I went. Then, dropping between one ridge and another, as if time had slipped, I came upon a band of pilgrims kneeling in the dunes, their hands cupped before them. They wore outsize fur hats and lavish mounds of turban, and the women’s veils were blowing in the wind. Their half-sung prayers trembled in the quiet.

Soon afterwards the sanctuary appeared. It might have been improvised from driftwood. A long, low mosque was bleaching in the wind, its dome stuck with flying sand, and latrines had been built over the grave of the saint’s killer. Beyond it, high walls of blistered plaster–ringed by a palisade of stakes and streaming flags–floated above the desert like a fantastical galleon on a yellow sea. Enclosed on its platform, the saint’s tomb was like the grave of a giant, daubed blue and yellow, under a rustling tumult of banners.

Barely fifty pilgrims had reached it. Most looked grimly poor. They stood along the protective fence, becalmed in worship. The stutter of their prayer, and the women’s mewling cries, were faint in the gathering storm. They looked like the occupants of a concentration camp, but they were all gazing inward, longing to enter, while knotted to every strand of the fence the rags of other worshippers–left as pleas for health, fortune, babies–fluttered in their torn thousands.

A group of caretakers stood nearby. And there were two plainclothes police. The workers joked with me: they were hoping somebody would donate a sheep. ‘Then we can feed you!’ The agents sat separate, bored. But when a stately old mullah arrived with a gaggle of villagers, one of the silent men detached himself and told them to return. The old man replied that they had come a long way, and the saint would protect them from SARS. They were permitted to pray for ten minutes.

The policeman, noticing my anger, said: ‘We are rooting out Wahabis.’

Wahabi had become a label for any Muslim zealot. There were surely none here. The
mazars
, said Osman later, were sites of seasonal celebration and the voicing of simple needs.

Nobody stopped me as I walked among the pilgrims round the fence. They prayed with muted sadness, several of the women crying, in a quiet, transposed grief for someone unknown, perhaps imaginary, killed a thousand years before. The spindly flagpoles, bound with the fleeces of sacrificial sheep, flapped and rasped above them. As the storm thickened, they did not move. Only the fence quivered and shook with its votive burden–with poverty,
barrenness and misfortune–as the wind sifted the dunes around the martyr’s grave.

Gul took me next morning to the Place of Drumbeats. Near the site of old Khotan, it marks the spot where the monk Xuanzang, returning from India in 644, was welcomed by the king with drums and incense into the city. This obscure tradition led us down overgrown tracks to a hillock dense with bamboo. Gul lingered below, playing with her small son, while I climbed a maze of footpaths to the summit.

The mound heaved among willows dripping dust. I clambered unthinking through the noon heat, the air sultry and windless. Suddenly I came on a heap of skeletons. Their skulls gleamed among scattered shin-bones and rib-cages. Bamboo was growing through their eye-sockets. Soon I was labouring up over a blackened litter of legs and arms and pates. My feet sent up spurts of anonymous dust. The entire slope, I realised, was man-made: I was ascending a hill of compacted corpses. At its summit a tower of baked brick had worn smooth and hollow. The hard grasses pierced its floor.

Descending, I saw a man in the fields. What was this place? I called. How old? He did not know. He came towards me. In rustic Mandarin he recounted a garbled myth of Buddhists butchering Muslims at Friday prayer. So the place opened in my journey like a dark space, awaiting explanation, which never came.

I blundered down, covered in dust, sick. Women were walking with hoes through the wheatfields, singing, and Gul was sitting under a willow nearby, while her son sprinkled her with a rain of dandelions.

The pilgrim monk Xuanzang recorded a strange story as he drew near Khotan from the west. The region was dimpled by mounds, he wrote, which were the home of gold-and silver-haired rats, the size of hedgehogs. Centuries before, an army of Huns had camped here against Buddhist Khotan, whose king, with a small contingent, confronted them in despair. But on the eve of battle he dreamt that the King of the Rats promised him help, and when the
Buddhists attacked next dawn the Huns found that in the night their harness and bowstrings had been gnawed through by a rodent army, and they were routed headlong. Thereafter, the rats were worshipped. The king built them a temple, and passers-by would descend from their chariots to offer them propitiatory gifts of clothes, flowers and meat.

A millennium and a half later Aurel Stein, travelling the same way, found the site still sacred, but its story transformed. The king of Khotan had become an Islamic saint, slain in battle against the Buddhists, and the rats were transposed into traitors from a nearby village who had entered the Muslim camp at night disguised as dogs, and dismantled its arms. (Later the village fell under a curse: all its males were born with four feet and a tail.) But from the Muslim martyr’s breast two sacred doves had flown, and in Stein’s day their descendants clouded the desert in their thousands above the shrine of Qumrabat Padshahim, ‘My King’s Castle in the Sand’, and were fed corn by pious passers-by.

Thirty miles west of Khotan, where Stein and Xuanzang had found the site, Gul and I enquired among blank-faced villagers. For hours we were passed from one family to the next, seated ceremoniously on quilts and carpets, fed on yoghurt and home-baked bread, until at last, in a hut poorer than the rest, we found the wife of the shrine’s guardian.

A faded track carried our Land-Rover along a stream and a lonely lake where wild ducks swam, and a tower stood in ruins. Then the water vanished underground. Along a trail of thinning grass we followed its course into the desert, and at last foundered to a stop by a mud hut high among the dunes. For fifteen years Arhun had been watchman here, guarding, as it seemed, nothing. He was squatting over the earth floor, but asleep. A few tattered bags hung on the walls, and a painted chest had disintegrated in one corner.

I could understand nothing he said. He was tiny, bewildered, coppery from wind and sun. But Gul translated, and bit by bit the watchman’s memories reassembled. The ‘pigeon shrine’ was five miles deeper into the desert, abandoned, he said, on a battlefield between Buddhists and Muslims. The saint had been felled by a
sword blow and buried where he lay, and all his descendants came to worship him, and be interred nearby. Out there also a Buddhist town lay in ruins, he said–he called it Chilamachin–and people had accused him of selling off its artefacts, but they were liars, and wicked.

But he had never heard of the golden-haired rats.

‘The place will change soon,’ he said. ‘People have found water, and it will be fields. When people move into a place, it becomes theirs. Or else the desert will take everything. The sand is coming in. Always. So you will be the last to see it. It will be gone.’

He drove me there alone in his donkey-trap. I sat on its bare planks behind him, while it jolted along a faint path between dunes sprinkled with grass. Its wheels were frail as a bicycle’s. Sometimes he turned his frosted head and shouted something–a word or phrase would surface intact–then he would go back to guiding the donkey, lifting a flimsy stick over its buttocks, while the scrub ebbed from the ridges.

Once he bellowed: ‘Where’s England?’ and I tried to pinpoint it by anything he might know. ‘Where’s America then?’

‘Beyond England. To the west.’

He raised his stick. ‘If America is there’–pointing to a dune–‘where is England? And where are we?…And do you have these in London?’ He whacked the donkey’s rump.

‘No, not these.’ I imagined donkey-carts streaming up Piccadilly.

After an hour he handed me lunch, opening his wizened palm on a walnut and five raisins. For a moment, among these sere slopes, there seemed nothing that the sun had not leached dry–the black-skinned watchman with his shrivelled gifts, the stunted donkey, the bleached cart. Then out of the wastes, where the last camel-thorn died and a range of pure sand surged across the skyline, I saw what appeared to be a scatter of low buildings high on the dunes, with a thicket of prayer-flags above them. Someone had tried to re-excavate a well in a hollow at the dune’s foot–this must have been the spring which Stein had noted–but the sand was sliding in again, and when we loosed the donkey it found nothing to drink.

As we climbed the long, soft slopes, the buildings dematerialised
before our eyes. Like fantastical theatre-sets they thinned into skeletal fences enclosing graves. Their frames had shredded into fragments, or toppled wholesale. Some ancient storm might have raged and subsided there. Now the slope was bathed in a stark brightness. In front of us the flagpoles multiplied over the hill, sunk in the sand like the pennants of drowned tents. The only sound, beyond the slurr of our footsteps–sand falling, settling, falling–was the rasp of stiffened flags in the breeze. Once Arhun pointed out earlier fence posts, lightly carved, sunk deep in the ground. Plainer ones had been raised above them. Every few years, it seemed, the sand sucked down all surface things, and they were replaced by ever more faded wood and memory.