Riding the Iron Rooster

by Paul Theroux

  Then there were sand dunes near the track—big soft slopes and bright piles; but the snowy peaks in the distance still remained. I had not realized that there was anything so strange as this on this planet.

  I was eating dinner in the empty dining car at about eight that night when we came to Jiayuguan. What I saw out the window is printed on my mind: in the summer dusk of the Gobi Desert, a Chinese town lay glowing in the sand, and rising above it, ten stories high, was the last gate in the Great Wall—the Jia Yu Watchtower—a fortresslike structure with pagoda roofs; and the train slowed at the Wall's end, a crumbled pile of mud bricks and ruined turrets the wind had simplified and sucked smooth. In the fading light of day, there was this ghostly remainder of the Great Wall, and what looked like the last town in China. The Wall went straggling west, but it was so small and destroyed it looked like little more than an idea or a suggestion—the remnants of a great scheme. But my excitement also came from seeing the red paint on the gate, and the yellow roof, and the thought that this train was passing beyond it into the unknown. The sun slanted on the gray hills and the desert and the blue bushes. Most of what I saw was through the blurring haze of the day's dust, and the intimation at sunset was that I would fall off the edge of the world as soon as it got dark.

  On my way back to my compartment I passed the Hard Class compartment, in which Uighurs were praying—kneeling on mats and facing southwest towards Mecca between the berths; and Chinese were brushing their teeth, and glugging tea, and hanging up laundry; and very loud Arabic music blasted from a portable tape player. Some people were sleeping and many were sighing, and a few spitting and hoicking. A card game was in progress, and a furious argument. Nearby a young girl placidly nursed her baby. The floor was thick with spittle, orange peels, peanut shells and tea dregs. More men entered, gargling, from the washroom.

  Someone grasped my arm. The light was bad, but I saw he had a big nose and wavy hair and a brown suit with bell-bottoms, a style that had become popular that year in the oases of the Xinjiang desert.

  "Shansh marnie?"

  It was the Uighur catchphrase: Change money?

  The Uighurs were officially designated a Chinese minority, and Xinjiang was their own autonomous region. They were a Turkic-speaking people, the remote descendants of nomads whose kingdom existed here 1200 years ago, and many of them looked like Italian peasants. It was no wonder that Marco Polo found them a friendly and fun-loving people. They were overwhelmed by the Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century, and were drafted into the army of this khanate. They converted to Islam, they adopted the Arabic script for their language, they were conquered by the Chinese several times, and several times rebelled, most recently a hundred years ago. There are about four million of them in Xinjiang, and they seemed totally out of sympathy with the Chinese and often mocking. Their world was entirely separate: it was Allah, and the Central Asian steppes, a culture of donkey carts and dancing girls. They ate mutton and bread. They were people of the bazaar, who—familiar with outlandish travelers—were travelers themselves. For the first time since the People's Republic was founded they were allowed to travel.

  They were the people who lurked outside the Friendship Stores in Peking and Shanghai, and stood discreetly outside the tourist hotels, looking like exchange students from a Mediterranean country. They usually wore dark suits and ties and platform shoes. They wore watches and sunglasses. Their Chinese was seldom fluent—but that was excusable: it was rare to find any Chinese person who spoke Uighur. But their history as a people had taught them to count in fifty languages. Numbers, after all, are the language of the bazaar. And they had two words of English.

  "Shansh marnie?"

  "How much?"

  "One dollar, four yuan." The official rate was three.

  "Say six." I was bargaining for the sake of it, and because it was such a novelty to encounter a black market in this upright, no tipping, no favors, anticorruption economy. What this Uighur and I were doing was sinning; and it felt delightful.

  "No six."

  "Five."

  "No five. Four." He also had bushy eyebrows and a big chin.

  He asked me how many dollars I wanted to change. He took out a pocket calculator and said that over a certain amount he could give me a better rate. The train rumbled on towards Ansi (Anxi). 1 lost interest in haggling and had no interest at all in changing money at the black-market rate. What fascinated me was his tenacity in sticking to this one-to-four rate. For him it was like a magic equation. But this Uighur was no fool. Two months later the Chinese government devalued the yuan to exactly this rate.

  That night the train crossed the Ravine of Baboons (Xingxing Xia), which had always been regarded as the frontier of Chinese Turkestan.

  'The desert which lies between Ansi and Hami is a howling wilderness, and the first thing which strikes the wayfarer is the dismalness of its uniform, black, pebble-strewn surface." That was Mildred speaking. And reading her book reminded me that I was missing one of the glories of this region by not visiting the caves at Dunhuang—Buddhas, frescoes, holy grottoes; the sacred city in the sands. But I intended to go one better, by visiting the lost city of Gaocheng (Karakhoja) whenever this train got to Turfan.

  I had gone to bed in a strange late twilight amid a rugged landscape; and I woke, slowly jogging in the train, to a fiat region of sand and stones. Farther off were large humpy sand dunes, which had the appearance of having softly flowed and blown there, because there was nothing like them nearby. The dunes were like simple gigantic animals that went blobbing along through the desert, smothering whatever they encountered.

  Soon a patch of green appeared—an oasis. Once there was merely a road linking the oases—but "once" meant only thirty years ago. Before then it was a rough road, what remained of the Silk Route. But these oases were not metaphors for a few trees and a stagnant pool. They were large towns, well watered from underground irrigation canals, and grapes and melons were grown in great profusion. Later in the day the train stopped at Hami. The Hami melon is famous all over China for its sweet taste and its fragrance; and Hami had been no insignificant place, although now it was what remained of the fruit-growing communes of the fifties and sixties. It had known great days, and had had a khan until this century. It had been overrun by Mongols, by Uighurs, by Tibetans and Dzungars. It had been repeatedly reoccupied by the Chinese since the year a.d. 73, during the Later Han Dynasty, and had been a Chinese city from 1698 onward. Nothing of this remained. What had not been damaged in the Muslim Rebellion of 1863–1873 had been flattened in the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese had a facility for literally defacing a city—taking all its characteristic features away, robbing it of its uniqueness, cutting its nose off. Now all Hami was known for was its pig iron.

  The peaks beyond Hami and farther up the line had patches of snow on their ridges that lay like saddle blankets, squarish and flat. But down here in the train and on the desert it was very hot—over one hundred degrees in the train and hotter outside. The sun burned down on the sand and stones. There were a few gullies, and in the oldest and deepest ones, which were sheltered, perhaps a dead wu-tong tree, and here and there clumps of camel thorn, the only identifiable weed, apart from the spikes of gray lichens. We were heading towards a dusty range of hills that was surmounted by a blue range of mountains, and rising up beyond were more mountains, which were bright with snow patches and ice slides—long streaks that might have been glaciers.

  They were the first sight I had of the Bogda Shan, The Mountains of God. They were very rugged and very high, but their snow was the only lively feature of this place. Beneath those mountains there was nothing but desert, "the howling wilderness," which this afternoon was too bright to stare at. Rainfall is unknown here, and most of those mountains seemed little more than a vast, poisoned massif—a lifeless pack of rock. This is the dead center of Asia.

  The Iron Rooster moved along at about thirty miles per hour, as it had done for two and a half days; moving slowly as the
landscape grew ever stranger. That was a good thing. If the train had been moving any faster it would have been impossible for me to comprehend the changes in the landscape, from the rice fields and little hills to the great bare mountains. A plane ride from Lanzhou to here would have resulted in shock, and from Peking, in total bewilderment. Arriving here by plane from anywhere else would have been like space travel—some interplanetary mind-bender.

  I paced up and down in my pajamas, among slumbering Uighurs, and occasionally had a beer. They were half a liter and cost 15 cents. Because we were on Peking time, the hottest part of the day was 4:30 in the afternoon, and it remained light enough to read by until almost midnight.

  In this oddly lighted world of snow and sand, the stone mountains reddened and rushed up to the train. In the distance was a green basin, 500 feet below sea level, the lowest place in China, and one of the hottest. Another oasis, the town of Turfan. Round about there was nothing else but a hundred miles of blackish gravel, and Turfan itself was twenty miles from the station. I got off the train here.

  Turfan ("one of the hottest places on the face of the earth") was an extremely popular oasis about 400 years ago. Before then it had been a desert town overrun by successive waves of nomads, Chinese, Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongols. The Silk Road established it as a great oasis and bazaar, but after that—from about the sixteenth century—it was all downhill. And after it was finally left alone by the warlords and the Manchus, new marauders appeared in the shape of enterprising archeologists, and the few frescoes and statues that remained after more than 2000 years of continuous civilization were snatched and carried away to places like Tokyo, Berlin, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Such a place seemed to me unmissable. The station was at the edge of the depression. All I could see were telephone poles in the stony desert, and the huge purply-red range called The Flaming Mountains. The town of Turfan did not reveal itself until I was almost on top of it, and even then it seemed less like a Chinese town than a Middle Eastern one—it was straight out of the Bible, with donkeys and grape arbors and mosques, and people who looked Lebanese, with brown faces and gray eyes.

  The desert was almost unbelievably horrible looking—bouldery and black, without a single green thing in it. And it seemed as though if you walked on those stones you would cut your feet. In some spots it looked like an immensity of coal ashes, with scatterings of clinkers and scorched stones. In other places it was dust, with rounded mounds piled here and there. The mounds I discovered were part of the irrigation system called the karez, a network of underground canals and boreholes that had been used successfully since the Western Han Dynasty, about 2000 years ago. There were also parts of this desert surrounding Turfan that had an undersea look, as of an ocean floor after the tide went out for good. Everyone called it the gobi the waterless place. Rainfall is unknown in Turfan.

  In this shallow green valley in the desert, in which all the water came from underground, there were no Chinese high rises, and most of the houses were small and square. There were grape arbors suspended over most of the streets—for the shade and also for the prettiness of them. This valley is the chief source of Chinese grapes—there is even a winery in Turfan—and thirty varieties of melon grow in the area. That intensifies the relief on having come from one of the wildest deserts in the world. Turfan is the opposite of everything that lies around it, with its water and its shade and its fresh fruit.

  Mr. Fang still tagged behind me, keeping his distance, sometimes speaking an ominous sentence.

  One of the most ominous for the traveler in China is: It is a new hotel. That sometimes struck fear into my heart. It implied peeling wallpaper, plush chairs, exposed wires, lights that didn't work, a hairy carpet, hard beds and a bathroom with no water, loose tiles, sticky glue on the sink, no shower curtain, and a cistern you had to fix yourself by twisting the ballcock. The doors on the fake-wood cabinets were usually stuck, the curtains were thin, the doorknobs loose, the coat hangers misshapen, the telephone didn't work, and neither did the radio. There was always a color television and a bunch of plastic flowers. Such places smelled of fish glue and failure, and they were terribly expensive. In all cases in China I preferred an old hotel. They weren't pretty but they worked.

  But Mr. Fang said the old place in Turfan was full, and he put me in the new, as yet unnamed hotel. It was half-finished, and it was empty. Its odor was powerful: fresh cement. In the rubble of the courtyard there was a fountain which contained hot dust and a stiff little mouse. I stood, a little dazed from the heat, and heard a donkey bawl.

  Because of Peking time, breakfast was served at nine-thirty, lunch at two, and dinner at nine in the evening. What are civilized hours in a place like Sandwich, Massachusetts, are very inconvenient in Chinese Turkestan. I woke hot and hungry at about six in the morning, and I had no appetite in the evening. But the eating hours were official and inflexible, and the local people woke late and went to bed late. Nothing I could do persuaded anyone to galvanize himself early, in the cool part of the day.

  "We will miss breakfast," Mr. Fang said.

  "Does that matter?"

  "We must have breakfast."

  I thought, What good are you? But it was not only that mealtimes were sacred. The food was paid for and therefore had to be eaten. And the Chinese are an oral people—that was another reason. Most of all, the Chinese are at their freest when they are eating. A meal is always a relief and a celebration.

  Yet I never wanted breakfast—noodles, thin rice gruel, meat dumplings, maybe mushrooms, and warm milk. As a foreigner I might be offered orange soda or a Pepsi with my breakfast noodles.

  In Turfan I bought the local raisins made from white grapes—the best in China—and apricots. And I sat in my room, eating that stuff and drinking my Dragon Well green tea and writing my notes, until Fang and the driver had had their fill of gruel, and then we set off down the dusty roads.

  Turfan was often a furnace. But on overcast mornings it was pleasant, with low clouds and temperatures only in the nineties. I liked the town. It was the least Chinese place I had seen so far, and it was one of the smallest and prettiest. There were very few motor vehicles, and it was quiet and completely horizontal.

  It was a Uighur town, with a few Chinese. There were also Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tadzhiks and Tungus around the place, bowlegged and in high boots, in the Mongolian fashion. They were leathery faced, and some looked like Slavs and some like gypsies, and most of them looked like people who had lost their way and were just stopping briefly in this oasis before moving on. Half the women at the Turfan bazaar had the features of fortune-tellers, and the others looked like Mediterranean peasants—dramatically different from anyone else in China. These brown-haired, gray-eyed, gypsy-featured women in velvet dresses—and very buxom, some of them—were quite attractive in a way that was the opposite to the oriental. You would not be surprised to learn that they were Italians or Armenians. You see those same faces in Palermo and Watertown, Massachusetts.

  Their gazes lingered, too. And some women came close and reached into the velvet and withdrew rolls of bills from between their breasts and said, "Shansh marnie?"

  They put this Chinese money into my hand—the money still warm from having been in their deep bosoms—and they offered me four to one. They had gold teeth, and some looked like foxes, and they hissed at me when I said no.

  It was wonderful, that market in Turfan, just what you would expect of a bazaar in Central Asia. They sold embroidered saddlebags, and leather holsters, and homemade jackknives, and baskets and belts. The meat market dealt exclusively in lamb and mutton—no pigs in this Islamic place; and there were stalls selling shish kebab. Much of the produce was the fresh fruit for which Turfan is well known—watermelons and Hami melons and tangerines. And there were about twenty varieties of dried fruit. I bought raisins and apricots, almonds and walnuts: it struck me that dried fruit and nuts were caravan food.

  There were tumblers and fire-eaters at the Turfan market, too, a
nd a man doing card tricks on an overturned wheelbarrow. There was something medieval about the market—the dust and the tents, the merchandise and the entertainers, and the people who had gathered there, the men in skullcaps, the women in shawls, the shrieking children with wild hair and dirty feet.

  Nothing puts human effort into better perspective than a ruined city. 'This was once a great capital," people say, pointing to fallen walls and broken streets and dust. Then you stand in the silence of the lifeless place and think of Ozymandias, King of Kings, covered by a sand dune and forgotten. It is very thrilling for an American to consider such a place, because we don't yet have anything that qualifies—only ghost towns and fairly insignificant small cities, but nothing like the monumental corpses of once-great cities that are known in the rest of the world. Probably American optimism arises from the fact that we don't have any devastated cities. There is something wearying and demoralizing about a lost city, but it can also give you a healthy disregard for real estate.

  Gaocheng was perfect in its ruin and decrepitude. It had been a renowned city for well over a thousand years, and now it was a pile of dust and crumbling mud. So far it had been spared the final insult—tourists—but one day, when the Iron Rooster turned into a streamlined train, they would find even this place, east of Turfan, twenty-five miles into the desert. It had had half a dozen different names—Karakhoja, Khocho, Dakianus (from the Roman Emperor Decius), Apsus (Ephesus), Idikut-Shahri (King Idikut's Town) and Erbu (Second Stop). Gaocheng had come to be its accepted name, but it hardly mattered, because there was not much left of it. Yet enough remained for anyone to see that it really had been an enormous place, a city on a grand scale, which was why it looked so sad. It had the melancholy emptiness of all great ruins.