I was working in a bookstore when I happened across a
biography of a Christian monk, Charles de Foucauld, who lived among the Tuareg
in the North African Sahara. Foucauld was a fascinating character and if you
are on the lookout for a gripping read, I would suggest finding a biography.
You don’t want to just skim the web on this guy; get something you can sink
your teeth into. Anyway, reading about Foucauld triggered in me an intense
interest in the Taklimakan Desert that has lasted to this day.
Even at the time, I was aware that the connection didn’t
make any sense. All I can say in my defense is that I was working in a
bookstore; wishing further tales of lives spend amidst the sands, I had many
choices. Since I was already reading Chinese history and classical literature
and studying Mandarin, it made more sense to focus on that part of the world,
so I ended up in the Taklimakan, a huge desert between China and Central Asia. Also,
it turned out there’s this thing called Central Asia that I didn’t really know
much about – and here was me, thinking I was an educated person!
It also turns out I’m not the first Westerner not to know about
Central Asia or, for that matter, China. There’s a whole literature of
exploration dating from ancient times onward about the rare and extraordinary contacts
between what today we casually call East and West. Happily, I live in an age
when much of this stuff has been translated into my language and is often even
available through the public library system. This literature is delightful fodder
for the armchair explorer; here is one scene that has stuck with me for years.
The Road to Oxiana (Robert Byron, 1937)
The year is 1933.
Robert Byron and his companion Christopher Sykes started out from in Europe,
traveling in search of the architectural
splendors of Central Asia. Now they are in Murghab, Tajikistan, trying to get
to Maimena in Afghanistan (Turkestan). This excerpt has been lightly edited,
mainly for punctuation.
Three cars stood in the Governor’s garden at Murghab. One
was the lifeless body of a grey Ford coupe. The others were Vauxhalls, new,
dark red, and closed; when it rained, they were covered with tarpaulins. Early
in the morning after our arrival the Governor and his son drove away in the
Vauxhalls to Maruchak on the Russian frontier. We looked forlornly at the Ford’s
engine scattered over the surrounding vegetable beds and ordered horses.
“I can take you to Maimena in the car if you like,” said a
Persian boy named Abbas, plucking the radiator out of a bush. “We will start in
an hour.”
The likelihood of covering more than two or three of the
intervening hundred miles in this preposterous vehicle seemed so remote that we
took none of the usual precautions before starting, prepared no food,
disdained, if only out of a courtesy to the driver, to count the car’s spare
parts, and even went so far as to wear our so-called best suits. The luggage
was put into the back, where it reached to the ceiling. When Christopher and I
stepped into the front, the chassis subsided a foot, as if we had been the
mother-in-law in a slapstick film. Abbas was winding the crank handle. Suddenly
his arm flew over his head, the noise of a blacksmith’s shop proceeded from the
now collected engine, and we bounded across the Governor’s flower beds while
Abbas, in flying pursuit, just reached the wheel in time to turn us through the
gate.
Down the main street the population fled; in a minute we
were through the town and tearing up a deserted valley. The luggage fell out of
the unglazed windows. The radiator, playing fountains to the sky, first declined
to the earth in front then fell backwards on top of the engine, entangling
itself in the fan, till we roped it up with our bedding cord. The sound of the
machinery became apocalyptic, clanking and fizzing without any sort of rhythm
till at last, with a final deafening cannonade, it ceased altogether. Abbas
beamed at us with the expression of a conductor laying down his baton after an
applauded symphony. A sympathetic report from the rear hind tire, though a beat
late, announced that it also needed rest for the moment. We had come ten miles.
There was no spare tire. Gathering up the shreds of the
outer cover, Abbas produced a patching outfit while Christopher and I, still
determined that fate should look after us, lowered our best suits on the grass
some way off. The afternoon shadows were lengthening. It remained to bring the engine
to life, but this was quickly accomplished by a few random blows with a hammer,
as one beats a child, and we jumped in just in time. We now began to realize
that the kangaroo paces of our vehicle, though not so comfortable as the glide
of [our] old Chevrolet, were taking us over a road which the Chevrolet could
never have tackled at all.
The valley we were following was about two miles broad. A
river ran along it on the west, confined in an earth cutting. On either side
rose earth hills, whose boneless green contours, rounded and polished by the
weather, had the glossiness of a horse’s flanks […] Valley and hills alike were
covered with a pasture of waving golden green, so rich that we could scarcely
believe it had not been specially sown; until, when we came to crops, they
seemed bare and thin by comparison. This wonderful country, with not a pebble
in it to impede the plough or seedling, was hardly inhabited.
Not a pebble assisted the surface of the road, either. When
we left the valley, turning form the north to northeast, the track was marked
simply by two ditches, dug for that purpose, which wound in and out of the
troughs of the downs. The grass, which had looked so smooth from a distance,
was full of holes and hummocks; every bump threatened to annihilate us. But imperceptibly
the distance to Maimena grew less, and we had come about forty miles when
Abbas, seeing two turf pillars by the road, suggested that though his headlights
left nothing to be desired we should stop here for the night. Feeling we had
tempted fate enough for one day, we agreed.
A side track from between the pillars led us over several
humpbacked bridges to a solitary house and yard overlooked by a grove of
poplars. Its owner came out to greet us, a man of middle height dressed in
white with a white turban, whose smile, framed by a curly dark brown beard, has
the innocence of a child’s. He showed us to a carpeted room furnished with a
sliding wooden window, a fireplace, and a lot of old books in a niche over the
door. It had the smell of an English drawing room, exhaled by a potpourri of
rose leaves that were drying in another niche. Children staggered in with the
luggage. Others brought us tea as we sat in the grass outside, gazing at the
cool serpentine shadows among the green hills smeared with gold, above which
rose the abrupt lilac peaks of the western Hindu Kush.
By supper time, horsemen were
arriving from the neighboring villages to have their ailments treated. One had
fever, one sores on his nose, which had been slit as a punishment; one
headaches and vomiting in the morning; one a pestilent skin disease all over
his back, which had lasted a year and looked like syphilis; but what could we
do for him? We doled out aspirin, quinine and ointment, all we had, and now
deliberately assumed the witch doctor’s air of mystification, saying the medicine
would not work, at least in the case of the sores, unless accompanied by
repeated washings in boiled water – yes, boiled,
we hissed – as though it had been a toad’s liver. This morning there were more of them.
I went for a walk after breakfast
in the poplar grove. Sparrows were twittering in the upper branches. Below, it
was shady and damp and smelt of an English wood, which caused me a stab of
homesickness. Then our host took us to see his walled garden, a vineyard with a
watch tower in the middle where he sits to enjoy the view and see who is
arriving. A dank dell in one corner contained a tangle of big crimson roses, of
which he picked us an armful each.
We asked if we could pay for our
shelter or at least for the food we had eaten. “No,” he said, “you cannot. My
house is not a shop. Besides, you gave the people your medicines.”
“He is a holy man,” explained
Abbas as we drove away, “who receives all travelers on this road. That is why
he puts up these things” – pointing to the grass pillars – “so that they shall
know his house is there. The name of the place is Kariz.”
The car smelt of roses as we
crossed the frontier into Turkestan.
