Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  At dawn we woke up to discover three nervy people standing ahead of our tents in line. Fortunately there were enough rush tickets to go around. After brushing our teeth and washing our faces in the theatre bathroom, we found our seats for the matinee performance. The lights dimmed, an eerie soundtrack struck up, and Shakespeare’s words transformed the theatre into a bleak Arctic island where it never stopped snowing, where sanity and madness were just a thin pane of ice apart, and where Jamie and I held hands in the darkness of the polar night.

  “O brave new world!” exulted Miranda. “That has such people in’t!”

  “Tis new to thee,” her father, Prospero, wryly clarified.

  A mutual acquaintance had put Jamie and me in touch over email when he realized we were both heading to Oxford in the fall. As I was cycling the Silk Road and sneaking into Tibet, Jamie was studying Arabic in Egypt and motorcycling into Syria. I read his travel blog in the smoky Chinese Internet cafés where I posted my own missives from the road, which Jamie read in turn, and we recognized in each other a common longing and lament—for the faraway and wild, for the loss of both from the world. “It is like having, as Pascal said, a God-shaped hole in your heart, but the hole is filled by empty space, silence, and nothingness,” he wrote from Egypt, articulating the nameless longing that I knew so well, and that only mountains and deserts seemed to satisfy.

  That September we each travelled to Ottawa for Sailing Weekend, when the latest batch of Canadian Rhodes scholars gathers to be wined and dined and toured around Parliament before launching across the Atlantic, though sadly no longer by boat. I feared I wouldn’t be going to England at all. Between returning from the Silk Road and heading to Ottawa, I’d barely had time to mail off my passport, which meant my student visa hadn’t been processed yet. Fortunately Arthur Kroeger, a kindly old Rhodes scholar and legend in the Canadian civil service, reassured me he’d sort things out through his connections at the British embassy. He mentioned that another scholar was in the same situation.

  Of course it was Jamie, just back from Egypt. His face was extremely pale, his red hair a lit torch. He spoke with a deep-keeled intensity and also a sense of his own smoothness, just the type you’d peg to win the World Universities Debating Championship—except for what he did afterwards. The tournament was in Malaysia that year, and as the debating began a tsunami struck southern Thailand. Instead of flying back to Canada to finish his law degree after his win, Jamie travelled to the devastated Thai coast and spent a month helping to clean up the wreckage. He was fascinated by wreckage; he had an anthropological obsession with it. We kissed the first night we met.

  That was in Ottawa, not long after we received our student visas. When a bus delivered us a few days later among Oxford’s dreaming spires, I remember marvelling over how a space cadet from small-town Ontario had ended up in this fairy tale. Not just the budding romance with Jamie, but the scholarship itself. Surely it was a mistake, some confusion on the part of the selection committee, but I planned to run with it as far and wide as I could. Though I’d originally intended to study science at Oxford—part of my overarching mission to become an astronaut and launch to Mars—I switched at the last minute into a master’s degree on the history of science. I’d be doing science for the rest of my life, I reasoned; why squander two years at Oxford in a laboratory? Especially when all laboratories are exactly alike: sterile, impersonal, replicable by necessity. The Bodleian Library, by contrast, has no parallel.

  Loosely supervising my studies was Professor Pietro Corsi, an operatic Italian in his late fifties who got all flushed and passionate about Darwin’s seven-year obsession with barnacles. Corsi’s specialty was the history of evolutionary theory, and his lecturing style was quaintly non-linear. “I had dinner last night with a very senior biochemist, eighty-four years of age, who talked about the history of science like he was a positivist living in the 1870s!” Corsi exclaimed, shaking his head ruefully. I exchanged baffled looks with the other grad students. “You see,” he continued, waving his tweed-clad arms, “a belief in logic, in rational progress toward truth, is a seductive thing for a scientist. I mean, I have no doubt at all that he is wrong, poor man, but you cannot kill him!” Then he levelled a dark, knowing look around the room. “This Oxford is a curious place. Everything here is forbidden, and that is why everything is possible . . .”

  Most aspects of Oxford—from the twisting cobbled streets to Corsi’s lectures—encouraged digression, which is, after all, just a sideways method for stumbling on connection. Such as between the philosophy of science and poetry, if one were to go by Emily Dickinson’s definition of the latter as whatever makes you feel as if the top of your head has been physically taken off. I tucked into bed one evening intending to put myself to sleep by skimming a few chapters of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which our class was discussing the next day. Instead I stayed up all night reading with demented avidity to the final page, my empirical understanding of the world undone by Kuhn’s argument that scientific theories are in essence evolutionarily selected stories, that is fictions that best fit the available facts—until the discovery of new facts forces a paradigm shift to a different and better fiction. More than that, he argues that scientists who embrace a new paradigm at an early stage—before sufficient evidence has been amassed to trigger a scientific revolution—do so not out of a sober consideration of the available facts, or at least not only that, but also with a subjective, irrational, from-the-gut leap of faith. Reading Kuhn and various other philosophers of science was like peering into the skull of a scientist, one of those Spock-like arbiters of imperishable truths, only to discover a raving mystic inside. I was rather partial to mystics, especially the writer Annie Dillard, but I never dreamed their motives and methods didn’t differ drastically from those of scientists, though in retrospect Dillard’s books should’ve prepared me for this. “What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab?” she asks in one of them. “Are they not both saying: Hello?” At dawn I put Kuhn’s book down and tapped the top of my head to make sure it was still there.

  Another class at Oxford revealed the connections, more depressingly, between war and science, the two ends of Galileo Galilei’s telescope. The Italian professor of mathematics was awarded tenure at the University of Padua for his vast improvements to the design of a spyglass for military purposes. Of course Galileo himself used the device to more peaceably spy on the heavens and in the process observed craters marring the moon, spots blemishing the sun, other moons orbiting Jupiter, and the fact that Venus has phases—observations that collectively threw the static universe into motion. All I saw, squinting through an exact replica of Galileo’s spyglass while standing on Broad Street at noon, wearing the clammy purple lab gloves our professor had provided to protect the gold-flecked leather tube from fingerprints, was the sign for the popular King’s Arms pub, its letters blurred and distorted by the glass—not so different, really, than how they looked to students exiting the pub.

  But the best part about studying the history of science? I suddenly had to do for homework what I normally did for fun: read expedition journals, such as Charles Darwin’s from his voyage on the Beagle.

  Though I’d known about Darwin since high school, I’d never read his diaries. They revealed that when he set sail for South America, at twenty-two, Darwin was little more than the ne’er-do-well son in a well-to-do British family. After failing to finish medical school (he couldn’t stomach the sight of blood) and failing to become a countryside parson (he was more concerned with collecting beetles than saving souls), Darwin begged his exasperated father to let him join the Beagle expedition—not as a naturalist, but as a gentleman companion to Captain Robert FitzRoy, who feared going mad if deprived of dignified society for years on end. Darwin even had to fund his own way, though he was subsidized by his affluent family.

  Once the Beagle set sail, Darwin was in his element—except for his chronic seasickness. Judging from his diaries,
the young naturalist seemed driven by the same restless, rangy impulses I recognized as my core. He exulted in the “strife of the unloosed elements” and the “inexpressible charm” of living in the open air. Wending along the coast of South America, and spending long stints on shore, Darwin was so staggered by what he saw—oceans blushing with chameleon octopi in Cape Verde, skies snowing butterflies in Patagonia—that he confessed at times he was scarcely able to walk. In the closing lines of his journals, Darwin urged aspiring young explorers to take all chances and start on a long voyage—by land if possible, he recommended generously, hoping others might avoid the queasiness he was never able to shake.

  I fell in love with this wide-eyed, seasick wanderer through his diaries, but upon further reading fell out again. After six years abroad, Darwin returned to England and in short order secured himself a wife, settled in a country cottage, and never travelled anywhere again. To be fair, it was during this transition from restless to rooted that Darwin elaborated the theory of evolution by natural selection. Fathering ten children, including one who died prematurely, and mysteriously poor health eventually anchored him in England. But what crushed me about Darwin was not that his long voyage ended. From reading Henry David Thoreau I knew you could travel widely from a cabin in Concord, and I hoped to someday do the same from a cabin in Atlin. Far more disturbing than Darwin staying home was his withdrawal from wonder.

  In his frank, confiding autobiography, Darwin describes how he turned into “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.” As he honed his taxonomic identification skills studying barnacles, pigeons, and other specimens from the Beagle, Darwin noticed himself becoming increasingly numb to music, poetry, and nature. “I retain some taste for fine scenery,” he confessed, “but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did.” Science became the elder Darwin’s exclusive passion, but that term usually connotes some measure of enjoyment, and what he seemed gripped with instead was a cold mania for sorting facts into theoretical frameworks. Meanwhile he lamented the withering of his more whimsical, imaginative sensibilities as a “loss of happiness.”

  I couldn’t believe the younger and older Darwins comprised the same person. His transmutation from madcap wanderer to morose scientist gave me chills, but I never imagined it could happen to me. Hadn’t I felt like Ralph Waldo Emerson all my life, crossing a nondescript field on a cloudy day, “glad to the brink of fear”? That’s how I felt walking out of my dorm at Hertford’s graduate residence, crossing a bridge over the River Thames, meandering along paths shaded with towering oaks in Christ Church Meadow, and then down a narrow cobbled street and up a creaking flight of stairs to where Jamie lived.

  Though we were fairly inseparable that first term, Jamie still wrote me letters, beautiful handwritten meditations I’d find in my pigeon hole, or “pidge,” as mailboxes in the porter’s lodge of Oxford colleges are called. “Real life is mental life, spiritual life,” he wrote in one such missive. “Wagering your soul is a real wager. As Benedict Allen said of travel and exploration”—we’d recently gone to a campus lecture by the British adventurer—“it’s not about making your mark on a place, but about letting it make its mark on you.”

  It wasn’t hard to imagine such missives being delivered by birds, the duck and swerve of words among Oxford’s mist-sleeved towers and leering gargoyles. Everything was forbidden, therefore everything was possible. “Keep off the Grass” read the signs posted on prim green lawns in the imposing stone quadrangles across campus, but manicured terrain held little appeal anyway. Instead I climbed over the stone-and-metal gate at Magdalen College into the deer park where C. S. Lewis used to stroll while dreaming up Narnia. Or I went running along the Thames, arriving back at my dorm with just enough time to shower and put on the only dress I owned: an elegant black gown studded with faint stars, its synthetic fabric so immune to wrinkles I could stuff it in a backpack, forget about it for days, then wear it to a formal ball. In Oxford, it seemed, they took place every other week.

  As Jamie and I walked home from one such event, the streets at midnight were full of students in fancy dress trying not to trip on cobblestones, and the champagne glow of the sodium lamplights was just dim enough to let some stars through. What I felt then came to define the radiant, widening two years I’d spend at Oxford: the delicious sensation of getting away with something, like I’d given real life the slip.

  * * *

  One weekend in early winter, when the English rain was relentless, Jamie swept me off to Cinque Terre, Italy, a destination he chose because it was sunny, abundant in cheap red wine and pesto, and also where Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned. We swam in the spit-warm turquoise waters of the Mediterranean and then read the doomed poet’s words to each other as we sunned dry on rocks. Jamie was somewhat obsessed with Shelley, the renegade Romantic poet who was expelled from Oxford for his atheism, only to later be apotheosized in a larger-than-life marble nude in one of the colleges. Many of Oxford’s most famous alumni never actually completed their degrees, from Shelley to former US president Bill Clinton, and Jamie openly aspired to follow in their footsteps. A lawyer turned Development Studies student, he skipped class often, wrote letters to me instead of term papers, and airily proclaimed that he “didn’t believe in development.” For his thesis he planned to write an aesthetic refutation of the whole enterprise, fairly certain it would rile his supervisors and get him ousted from the establishment.

  While I didn’t plan to fail out if I could help it, I knew that nothing I did at Oxford really mattered in the scope of my extraplanetary ambitions: a Ph.D. admissions committee at MIT, where I hoped to study microbiology in extreme environments, wouldn’t care about my results in a humanities degree. I’d made my way to England by being good at school, hence the scholarship to Oxford, but once I got there I almost learned not to care about it, or rather to care for the right reasons: not as a means to a Martian end, or success as sanctioned by others, but as an opportunity to think, dream, stray out of bounds. A venue, in other words, for exploration.

  What would you study if there was no such thing as making the grade? In my case, I obsessed over the reports of early Himalayan explorers and scrutinized centuries-old survey charts in the Bodleian Library, trying to glean the logic behind the lines Mel and I had seen (and snuck across) on the Tibetan Plateau. On every map I examined, a huge bleed of white to the west of the Aksai Chin caught my eye, in part because it reminded me of the Juneau Icefield. This particular enormity of slow-flowing ice, I learned, was the Siachen Glacier, one of the last unexplored gaps on the map until the early twentieth century, when the redoubtable Mrs. Fanny Bullock Workman hitched up her tweed petticoat and hiked onto its base.

  In her mittened hand she gripped a sign declaring—not asking, thank you very much—“Votes for Women.” Plodding breathlessly a few steps behind her was Dr. Hunter Workman, and behind him were a dozen porters hired to ferry their gear. The Workmans were wealthy amateur naturalists from America, a husband-and-wife team. After a doctor prescribed fresh air and foreign travel as a cure for Hunter’s chronic lassitude, the two of them launched on cycling journeys through Spain, India, Burma, Ceylon, Java, and parts of Africa. When they ran out of roads, they began trekking in what was then Baltistan in British India, which centuries before was a part of Tibet, and today is contested Kashmir. From there they crossed the Karakoram Pass and followed a southern route of the Silk Road into terra incognita: the Silver Throne plateau of the Siachen Glacier, where Hunter snapped an iconic photo of Fanny in a tweed dress and ribboned hat, championing suffrage at 21,000 feet.

  Siachen roughly translates from Balti as “the place of wild roses” and is named for the hardy flowers that take root in its glacial till. According to Fanny’s 1917 book, Two Summers in the Ice-Wilds of Eastern Karakoram, she preferred to call the glacier “the Rose,” pleased by the incongruity of this dainty label applied to a violence of rock and ice. Fanny claimed she wanted to go there fo
r strictly scientific reasons, to survey the glacier and triangulate all its important peaks, but this smacked to me of logic appended to pure longing, and I would know. All I’d really wanted to do on the Juneau Icefield was wander around, see the world from a different point of view, though if anyone asked, I’d come to study the geophysics of glacial flow. I was smitten with wildness, and only incidentally with science, and I suspected the same was true for Fanny.

  Not that she wasn’t a capable and dedicated scientist: she became the first to study the full sweep of Siachen, which meant cataloguing the glacier’s biological and geological diversity, naming its unreckoned peaks, and measuring its contours—work that revealed it as the world’s longest known glacier beyond the polar regions. And yet she gained greater renown for suffragette stunts on mountaintops than these scholarly contributions—less a reflection of the quality of her science, perhaps, than of the fact of her being female in an era when explorers weren’t. Whatever the case, her ideas were overlooked in contemporary geographic literature, her mapping criticized as inaccurate, and her surveying nomenclature almost entirely discarded. Even modern historians have uncharitably dismissed Fanny as “farcical,” “amateurish,” and “responsible for introducing a slight note of comedy into the awe-inspiring world of the high peaks.”

  As I read these criticisms in the Bodleian Library, or the “Bod,” as students called it, I thought back to sneaking into Tibet, where a chubby Chinese policeman had handed me not a stiff fine, or even stiffer handcuffs, but cucumbers. Cucumbers! Only people who’d never actually travelled to the Himalaya could claim humour has no place there. Compared to the preening self-importance of most early Himalayan explorers, Fanny brought a refreshing dose of flair and whimsy to the highest altitudes. I admired her unlimited verve and refusal to be demure. Calling Siachen “the Rose” was, perhaps, a bit much, but a glacier is still a glacier by any other name. Just as the Tibetan Plateau, whether you call it Bod or Xizang, heaven or hell, is still a sky-raking tumult of rock and ice and turquoise water—the kind of landscape that, as even Fanny confessed, “was ever tightening its grip on my soul.”