Shadow of the Silk Road (15 page)

Then we emerged on to a desert plateau. It was dimpled by the craters of salt-diggers, and glazed with gravel far to the horizon. We got out into a warm wind. Behind us, the oasis smeared the
horizon lime-green, where a pair of factory chimneys were smoking. In front of us was nothing at all. A dust-devil travelled leisurely against the sky. All about us the ground was ruffled by yellow circles where the sand had shifted in, and was strewn with slivers of wood and bleached bones.

A lone shelter stood on the flats. It covered a pit where wooden props still thrust up strong after two thousand years. I stared down in its dim light. Beneath me some fifteen human beings sat in families together, their knees drawn up, their clothes in tatters. All colour had been drained out of them, their flesh hardened to mahogany, and they were glazed by a uniform dust. The salt-dry air had preserved the frame of a harp, a leather toilet box, even the remains of roast mutton chops for the dead. Several of their heads were smooth as stone, expressionless, so that I was reminded of abstract sculpture or the statue of Guanyin.

The pit was only one of hundreds of graves multiplying for a mile along the flats. Their desiccating sands and salt have yielded an astonishing people. Many go back more than three thousand years, and some have been pulled from the sand so well preserved that they might have just fallen asleep there. These corpses are not Mongoloid, but Western giants with blond and reddish hair, high-bridged noses and heavy beards. Beneath me the shapes were too blackened to recognise, but in a grave close by, dug in 1000
BC
, a prodigious fair-haired chief was discovered intact with his wives. In another chamber an elderly woman–a shamaness, perhaps–had lain beneath evidence of violent sacrifice. Through the chamber ceiling a baby boy had been inserted face downwards, his nose and cheeks still smeared with mucus and tears, while on a platform above her a young woman lay dismembered, her clothes soaked in blood, and her eyes gouged out.

Early Chinese annals reported grotesque barbarians on their western frontiers: a white-skinned rabble with flaming hair, outsize noses and green or blue eyes. But as the first millennium wore on, these strangers were forgotten. A century ago Western archaeologists were astonished by what they found. Now these enigmatic mummies have surfaced all round the Taklamakan, some of them dressed in Celtic-looking tartans, others in witches’ hats.

Around their origins, controversy rages. Out of a maze of linguistic and archaeological data, they move against the great east–west tide of nomad migration, and flow down in the third millennium
BC
out of the Siberian steppes, from the easternmost reaches of the Indo-European world. In time these so-called Tocharians were followed by their Indo-Iranian cousins, in eastward drifts of restless cavalry, and intermingled with them in the oases, and only by about 300
BC
did a counterwave of Mongoloid peoples flood in. As late as the tenth century
AD

Tocharian descendants walk across the murals of cave temples fringing the Taklamakan. Their neatly parted hair is blond or ginger, and their eyes pale. But they are pious Buddhists now, dressed in the high Persian fashion, in stiff, brocaded coats, and their hands rest on long-hilted swords, like those of medieval knights.

The Uighur, who absorbed these people after the ninth century, embrace them as ancestors. Long pre-dating China’s rule, the Tocharians seem to lend them an ancient right of possession. Red hair and blue or hazel eyes surface like eerie memories among today’s populace, and Uighur nationalists have adopted the reconstructed face of a once-beautiful mummy as ‘the mother of the nation’. DNA tests, all but thwarted by Beijing, confirmed the corpses’ European link. Nervous Chinese officials have been accused of letting the telltale mummies rot in museum basements, while more workaday despoilers–scavenging villagers, salt-diggers, even pious Muslims–have scattered the corpses in thousands over the sands.

No one is here. Only the whirr of air-conditioning in the darkness. The museum is half demolished, and the traffic of Urumqi mutters outside. In their cabinets the bodies lie as if tumbled in sleep. I walk among them lightly, fearing they might wake. The chosen mother of the Uighur people, ‘the Beauty of Kroran’, lies stretched in brown woollens and a pointed hood, plumed with a goose feather. Her hip-bones are pressing through her tight dress, whose fur is turned inward for warmth, and bearskin moccasins are disintegrating round her feet. I circle her, feeling a voyeur, alone. The museum
label acknowledges her of European race. Her chestnut hair is parted around regular features: the scaffolding of a delicate beauty. Her eyes are closed under long lashes, and her small, childish teeth gleam through thin lips. She is four thousand years old.

An overwrought Chinese archaeologist fell in love with one of these corpses he disinterred. Imagination fills in whatever is absent, as with someone glimpsed in passing. But death has not simplified ‘the Beauty of Kroran’. Her clothes, and the winnowing tray and wheat basket found beside her, betray a people who came with sheep and new grains from the west. But the face shrunken in her cowl has dried to ebony, and her eyes are sunk away. Archaeologists found that nits had infested her brows and eyelashes, and her lungs were filled with charcoal dust.

A thousand years after her, an Indo-European people were still being buried on the salt plateau of Cherchen, astonishing for their size and fairness. In the next-door cabinet a tribal chief lies stiffened in mortal tension. His knees and head are tilted upwards, and his long hands curl across his stomach, every fingernail and knuckle clear. His face is pale and fiercely aquiline. Long, reddish-brown hair tumbles about it, with a short beard, and sunbursts of yellow ochre cover his temples and Roman nose in an enigmatic half-mask. He stood almost six foot tall, and was buried with ten hats–including a beret and a cap with white felt horns–and the matted wool of his leggings has burst through his deerskin boots in dashing layers of scarlet and eggshell blue. At any moment, it seems, he may lurch up and give orders.

Three women accompanied him in death, perhaps sacrificed, and one wears a dress dyed the same burgundy-red as his shirt and trousers. In another cabinet a baby discovered close by lies wrapped in a magenta shroud, tied safe with a blue and red cord–the same cord as gently ties in place the chieftain’s hands. The baby’s head is warmed by a blue bonnet, from which poke auburn locks. The face is masked in flesh-coloured paint, the nostrils stuffed with wool, and the eyes covered by flat blue pebbles. A nursing bottle lies nearby, shaped from a sheep’s udder.

I stare at these a while, wondering which woman’s child this is, buried in another grave. The painted face bears no expression. It
seems less like an infant than a tenderly trussed parcel, attracting curiosity across the years not to itself, but to whoever in grief or ritual wrapped her disappointment in blue and magenta–the colour of its father’s shirt–and placed the head on a white pillow, and closed its eyes with stones.

The bodies send up a flutter of apprehension. They seem paralysed in the act of dying, delayed here by accident, like birds frozen in flight. In the museum entrance a notice declares that its relics prove this province to be an inalienable part of China. But they suggest, of course, the opposite.

The corpses are not at rest. Their outlandish preservation lifts them out of prehistory into the political present, more potent than a skeleton or a fragment of DNA. They wait like a solemn family. There seems something conditional about their postures–their knees tilted askew, their tentatively furled hands–as if one day they will get up and take their baby into the streets.

For hundreds of miles my bus crossed a wind-torn wilderness, its surface glazed with pulverised stone swept down from the Kun Lun. The stillness of the previous night had gone. Somewhere in the desert’s core a storm was raging, and soon the sand was streaming over the ground in low, scudding waves, and the sky had dimmed to premature dusk. Objects appeared and melted in the half-light–tamarisk trees, an abandoned truck. The sun died to a white stain. Occasionally we stopped at tiny settlements where sheep were grazing on litter, and brushwood fences bent against the moving sands.

The bus was empty except for silent farmers in sheepskin hats and a gang of village youths. Their dark, pitted faces were powdered with beards. One tried to play a bamboo flute, but gave up, and they turned to scrutinise my possessions. How much were my boots, my watch? When I said I’d forgotten, they hooted in disbelief. But now the dust was swirling through the cracked windows and settled in a tawny membrane over every surface, while we retched and coughed.

Outside, the sand was exploding off the high dunes. The world stopped at fifty yards. The tracks of meltwater rivers wove out of nowhere and disappeared back into the storm. Soon earth and air had fused in a single vacancy. The dunes seemed to be rising vertically above us, and we moving through elemental sand. I imagined the whole desert reassembling, covering its scars. Sometimes the storm brought us to a halt altogether, our headlights flickering weakly, and we sat and listened to the wind howling.

These black hurricanes, the
kara-buran
, I knew, could lift up whole sand dunes and had buried caravans without trace. Even in stillness, the Taklamakan was the most dangerous desert on earth. Its name perhaps means ‘abandoned place’, but in local parlance ‘You go in and you never return.’ In its heart, unlike the Sahara, nothing lives. It is almost rainless. Silk Road merchants found their way by no landmarks but the piled bones of animals and men. And they peopled it with demons. The shifting sand particles in sharp temperature changes stirred plaintive music and piteous cries, which lured travellers to their end. Marco Polo spoke of the tramp and clash of great cavalcades at night, which panicked merchants into believing that an army was on the move. Sometimes magnetic sparks glint like camp fires on the night horizon, and movements close at hand are streaked with uncanny light.

But the darkness, as we crept toward Niya, was empty of everything but blown sand. Somewhere we passed the turning where the cross-desert highway comes down from the north to serve the oil wells of Tazhong, and at last we stumbled out into a bare hotel. On this half-abandoned route the inns belong to an older China: flyblown hostels with flooded lavatories and enamel spittoons and stone-hard pillows. Cold water dribbled out of a tap, where electric fittings dangled from cracked tiles. The few carpets were punctured by cigarette burns, and familiar smells–noodles, urine, cooking fat–mingled and drowsed into sleep.

Sometimes you feel yourself weightless, thinned. You draw back the curtains (if there are any) on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn, and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you
identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. Even your ties of love have been attenuated (the emergency satellite phone is in my rucksack, and nobody calls). Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable. You fear only your failure to understand or to reach where you are going. Sometimes you are moved by a kind of heartless curiosity, which shames you only on your return home. At other times you are touched, even torn; but you move on.

In this heady state–I am reminded of a bird, alert, brittle, free–I breakfasted on biscuits from my rucksack and went out into the deserted street. The air was warm and close. I could not tell if the sun had risen. The sky was sealed in its own colourless light, as if some pallid lamp were shining behind a gauze. Sand had drifted over the roads, and a storm was still bending the poplars. In the bus the woman behind me started praying in a whisper, her hands clasped on her breast. And hours later, as we pulled into Keriya, the tempest was still raging.

I sheltered with other passengers in the nearest restaurant. Boisterous jokes and innuendo blew between the tables, and the owner and his wife–who shared European features and green eyes–served me a mountainous pilau, and wondered which oasis I came from, since I could not speak their Uighur. All around them gales of laughter were swirling between burly men and open-faced women. Only the sultry daughter simmered stormily at her mother, and refused to smile.

I settled hungrily to eat, warmed by the zest around me. Outside the window, men in toppling sheepskin hats were driving their goats through the flying sand, and women went muffled in white veils beneath local caps like inverted teacups. This region was peculiar, I knew. The Uighur are more than fifty per cent Caucasoid–so genetic research reveals–and here at Keriya, at the desert’s south-east reach, survive the most hybrid people of all. Every few minutes the doors flew open and another windblown apparition burst in on us. Sometimes they pulled off their shaggy hats from tangles of fiery hair, and their features drooped in long, heavy-lidded collages of forgotten ancestry. Sometimes the sundarkened faces were lit by uncanny eyes. A mixture of early
Iranian, Tocharian, even Bactrian turned them to a walking memory of peoples who had vanished. A rosy-faced man reminded me of a friend in England, but he wore a faded skull-cap and had a limp. A trio of women peeled their scarves from faces of olive pallor.

Trying to comprehend the medley of voices and features around me, I was slipping into a river where nations lost their meaning. This, after all, was the road whose Chinese silk lay in the graves of Iron Age Germany. It had spread variousness, and a rich impurity. And the Taklamakan was both its nemesis and protector. The desert has turned up seals engraved with Zeus and Pallas Athene: the distant legacy of Alexander the Great. A shroud from its eastern salt-flats displays a portrait of Hermes, complete with his caduceus, and the two-thousand-year-old corpse of a Chinese official lies buried in a coat woven with Graeco-Roman cherubs. Everything seems in flux. The long sleeves beloved of Chinese opera appear to have come, through many permutations, from ancient Crete. The tartan plaids of Tocharian mummies echo those of early Celts, and gold Byzantine coins stopped the mouths of Tang dynasty corpses, or were converted by its nobles into jewellery, still incised with the symbols of Christian kingship.