Journeys on the Silk Road (15 page)

Despite his drug-addled team, what he uncovered during a month in the desert while awaiting Wang’s return would reveal as much about ancient secular and military life as the caves would about spiritual life. He returned to the ruined fort where he had halted en route to Dunhuang, on whose ramparts he had walked alone, pondering the rise and fall of empires. He soon realized this ruined fort was one of the very sites he had set out to find, and among the most important of the ancient world. It was the famed Jade Gate, the fort named after the precious stone from Khotan carried by caravans traveling east. Stein had uncovered what he described as the western extension of the Great Wall, built to keep out invaders, extend China’s influence and safeguard the Silk Road trade. He marveled at the strength of the wall, built with bundled layers of tamarisk twigs, reeds, and stamped clay. “Across an extensive desert area, bare of all resources, and of water in particular, it must have been a difficult task to construct a wall so solid as this,” he remarked.

At a watchtower near the Jade Gate he found a post bag lost in transit between China and Samarkand around 313. Within it was a unique collection of letters, written in Sogdian, a Persian language that was once the Silk Road’s lingua franca. The Sogdians are remembered today as the Silk Road’s great merchants—although in one of these letters a trader is recalled in far less flattering terms. The merchant’s wife, abandoned with their daughter in Dunhuang, penned a letter cursing her fate. Her fury is evident 1,700 years on. Destitute and far from home she writes to him, “I would rather be a dog’s or a pig’s wife than yours!”

From the desert sand, Stein also pulled relics of China’s ancient military might. There were mundane reminders, such as a “sorry we missed you” note, carved on a stick by three men and intended for their friend stationed at a garrison. Stein excavated a dungeon, like a deep well, whose grim horrors he preferred not to dwell on—horrors that seemed to be confirmed when he not only found a note about a man who had died after a beating but uncovered a stick used to inflict such punishment. He also unearthed shreds of the fabric intricately connected with the area: silk. Past and present seemed to merge as he found objects so well preserved they looked as if they had been abandoned the previous day. He was in his element. In a letter that seemed to reflect the Buddhist beliefs that surrounded him, he told Allen:

I feel at times as I ride along the wall to examine new towers, etc, as if I were going to inspect posts still held by the living. With the experience daily repeated of perishable things wonderfully preserved one risks gradually losing the true sense of time. Two thousand years seem so brief a span when the sweepings from the soldiers’ huts still lie practically on the surface in front of the doors or when I see the huge stacks of reed bundles as used for repairing the wall still in situ near the posts, just like stacks of spare sleepers near a railway station. I love my prospecting rides in the evenings especially when the winds have cleared the sky . . . I feel strangely at home here along this desolate frontier—as if I had known it in a previous birth.

The ruined wall prompted a rare reflection on his “beloved father,” who had followed the paths of old Roman walls in southern Hungary. “He had spent many a hot day in tracing their lines; but, alas, the day never came when he could show me what had puzzled & fascinated him.” Perhaps Stein felt a twinge of sorrow that, as he too stood before an ancient wall, he was unable to share his own fascination with his late father, by then dead nearly two decades.

In a sheltered spot, he found evidence of a more recent visit: his footprints made a month earlier remained undisturbed by the desert winds. (He would be even more surprised when he returned seven years later to find an echo of 1907: not just his own footprints but also those of Dash the Great.) Amid the ruins of a recently abandoned homestead he left something for a future archaeologist who might visit in another two thousand years—a piece of dated newspaper.

Thrilled as he was by his discoveries, the weeks of marching from site to site were not without difficulties. Stein knew his opium-addled laborers, good-natured though they were, would far rather be elsewhere. “If they are people hard to keep at work, especially in the desert, they are yet jovial & wonderfully well-mannered. You ought to have seen the polite bearing, the pleasant smile of my laborers, though they were ever at the point of deserting,” he wrote to Allen. Some of them did.

There were ructions too among his core crew. His camel man Hassan Akhun picked a fight with one of the Chinese laborers. This prompted retaliation from the entire group of laborers, who set aside their good manners and attacked the camel man. The rheumatic surveyor Ram Singh was full of complaints. There was too little rest and not enough comfort for his liking. He was dissatisfied with his pony and wanted a better one. He was unhappy about sharing a cook with the Naik and irritated by the latter’s snoring. Stein’s Kashmiri cook, Ramzan, went on strike before taking a pony and disappearing. Stein figured he would not get far. He knew the cook would go to Dunhuang, where his presence would soon be noticed. Sure enough, his arrival alone in the oasis aroused such suspicion he was arrested and locked up. And there he would have stayed until Stein returned from the desert had not the trader Zahid Beg, who had told Stein the rumors of the manuscripts, bailed him out and agreed to keep an eye on him. The cook, realizing he had no chance of escaping his contract, decided instead on a sulky apology. He pleaded “mental distemper brought on by the air of the desert.” Even Stein’s dog disappeared for a time. Dash took off in the desert with shepherd dogs only to return badly mauled.

The change of seasons was swift and dramatic. Clouds of mosquitoes filled the air and Stein, who suffered from repeated bouts of malaria, attempted in vain to shield himself with a protective net. “So I have learned at last how the world looks through a veil. But I am glad that ladies always wearing it have something more pleasant to look at!” Soon desert digging would be impossible, and not just because of the baking heat. For spring, which elsewhere brings renewal and hope, in this desert unleashes its most destructive might: sandstorms, or burans.

Even witnessed from the safety of an oasis, a buran could terrify. Catherine Macartney described “a great black pillar advancing towards us through the clean air, with the sun shining on either side of the black mass. It grew bigger and bigger, while the sun became a ball of red before it disappeared entirely.” The sky grew darker, and the distant wind shrieked before the storm burst upon Kashgar with a roar. “The trees bent as though they must break and it grew dark as night, while the dust in the air penetrated through the cracks and crevices covering everything, making it difficult even to breathe.”

For those exposed in the desert, a buran could strike with deadly force. It obliterated all tracks and sense of direction, its fury impossible to withstand. The only defense for caravan men was to shield behind their kneeling camels or take cover under heavy felt blankets—no matter how hot the day—as rocks pelted down for hours. But that was no guarantee of survival. Many have perished in such sandstorms, including a sixty-man caravan en route to Turfan in 1905. “Like hell let loose” is how von Le Coq described a buran. Stein, less dramatic than von Le Coq, made a brief note in his diary shortly before concluding his desert dig: “Overtaken by violent sand storm driving before it even small pebbles.”

Spring showed its more benign face when Stein returned to the Dunhuang oasis in mid-May. Fields of young green corn had sprung up in the weeks he had been away, and the wild blue irises growing beside the roadside reminded him of Kashmir. Elm trees that had looked like skeletons on his first arrival were now green, and peach and pear blossoms sprinkled his tent in the widow’s garden. After so long in the desert, the sight soothed his “parched, dust-filled eyes.” Although his thoughts had never been far from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, he soon learned he would have to contain his ever-growing impatience for a few more days. The good news was that Wang had returned from his begging tour. The bad was that the caves were swarming with visitors. An annual pilgrimage was under way and thousands of locals dressed in their bright holiday clothes were bumping their way in carts to worship at the shrines. Eager as he was to move his caravan to the site that drew him “with the strength of a hidden magnet,” this was not the time to do so. What he had in mind could best be accomplished away from prying eyes. With the oasis in its spring dress, for once Stein welcomed a brief, peaceful interlude. He rarely seemed more contented or reflective as on the day spent beside Crescent Lake, Dunhuang’s other magnificent sight.

“The skill of man made the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, but the Hand of God fashioned the Lake of the Crescent Moon.” So said the Dunhuang locals, according to two hardy British missionaries, Mildred Cable and Francesca French, who stopped beside it in the early 1900s. Even today the perfect crescent in a hollow amid the towering dunes bewitches, reflecting clear blue sky amid golden sands.

At the lake, about three miles south of Dunhuang, Stein and Chiang spent a rare relaxing day. The pagoda and temples on the southern fringe of the lake, a quarter of a mile long, were filled with a mix of Buddhist and Daoist statues and murals. The offerings within were recent, but the annual pilgrimage to the caves meant the pious were elsewhere. No one was around to disturb their tranquil respite. The lake so enchanted Stein as he sat beside it writing to Allen that he volunteered he might choose it as the site of his own grave. “There could be no more appropriate place of rest for a desert wanderer than this charming little Tirtha [pilgrimage place] enclosed all round by sand ridges up to 300 ft in height.”

If the sight prompted reflections on mortality in Stein, it prompted acts of levity in his assistant. Stein watched in amusement as Chiang slid down one of the dunes. It was, he told Stein, to test the local lore that the dunes could be made to produce miraculous music. In his dainty velvet boots, Chiang slowly ascended his chosen dune. With each step, the powdery sand gave way, but finally Chiang reached the summit, turned around and began his descent. As he skittered down the dune, both men heard a “sound like that of distant carts rumbling,” satisfying them that the legend was based on fact. The Ming Sha dunes had earned their name: the Singing Sands. Chiang shared with Stein a local folk tale he had gleaned, that after the annual pilgrimage, the gods would send a violent dust storm to cleanse the sacred caves. Given that buran season was approaching, Stein felt the prediction of a “divine sweeping” was almost certain to come true.

After nearly a year in each other’s company, a strong friendship had developed between the two men. Not only had Chiang adapted to the wandering life, he had developed a keen interest in the finds being uncovered, and he kept his ear to the ground for folk tales and far more besides. “My brave [Chiang] is an excellent diplomat and why I am even more grateful for an indefatigable worker,” Stein told Allen. “It is great comfort to have a gentleman by one’s side & one ever cheerful.” As Stein sat by Crescent Lake on that idyllic spring day, penning lines to his dear friend in England, thanking good fortune for his Chinese comrade—and amused by his moment of sand-sliding whimsy—Stein could not know just how crucial a role Chiang was about to play.