House of Kariz and Other Exotic Wonders

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.