Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

by Kate Harris

  So what happens when you can’t travel, not in words, not in the world? Along the eastern shore of Zorkul we passed a rock hut chinked with dung outside of which yaks grazed. A little boy ran outside when he saw us, but it was getting too late in the day to stop, so Mel and I waved goodbye and continued biking. In response he threw a fistful of stones at us. The gesture seemed more full of mischief than malice, but we pedalled hard to get beyond arm’s reach, just in case, and I often wondered whether that boy had darker, more ineffable targets in mind, such as the freedom certain humans, by total fluke, are born into, or the fact that the same road leads different people different places. Mel and I were just passing by, moving on, the wind erasing our tracks behind us.

  Unlike political frontiers, so crisp and martial—precisely here is Tajikistan, exactly there Afghanistan—ecological borders are more often murky, a mosaic of give-and-take: the thinning of greenery above the treeline at Zorkul, say, or the interlude of dusk that drew marmots from their dens. The scientific term for such natural frontiers is ecotone, coined from the Greek oikos (home) and tonos (tension), suggesting that being truly rooted requires a certain restlessness, that home is a less static place than a state of potential energy. If it weren’t for the rigid walls built by politics, the concept might apply to everyone living in the Pamir, from human communities to flocks of Marco Polo sheep. Not that I could see them: the herds blended in with the boulders so seamlessly that land and creature became one, sheep being the part of the mountains that moved.

  “See? Many, many. See there,” exclaimed Sergei, a weather-beaten guide we’d hired to help us spot the herds. But when I glanced through his spotting scope I only saw gravel, sky, clouds. Mel took a look and shook her head. The shy herd had disappeared over a ridge.

  We got back into Sergei’s 4WD jeep and he tried to drive closer, which meant gunning up a steep slope of loose dirt, gravel, and grass. As the wheels spun out uselessly Mel nodded in sympathy. “Story of my life,” she commiserated. Sergei cheered in triumph when he finally managed to crest the hill, prompting Timurlane, his fourteen-year-old son, to roll his eyes as if his father were insufferably unhip. A city boy exiled to the Pamir for the summer, he wore a black faux leather jacket, black jeans, scuffed sneakers, metallic aviator sunglasses, and a glowering look that befitted someone named for Central Asia’s deadliest ruler. This incarnation of Timurlane also had political ambitions, but fortunately they involved going to Oxford and becoming a diplomat. When I mentioned I’d gone to Oxford myself his face lit up until he remembered that unabashed enthusiasm wasn’t cool, which was the story of my life.

  Sergei stopped the car and waved toward a mountain slope that looked empty. I looked through the spotting scope in the direction he’d gestured, and what I’d taken for boulders resolved into hundreds upon hundreds of sheep. The flock poured over the land like light, at once particle and wave, moving up the mountain with a liquid grace that left me stunned.

  “Can we go now?” said Timurlane, bored beyond belief. He kept playing ring tones on his fancy cellphone as if that might summon reception. His father could probably afford to send him to Oxford, not from guiding tourists like Mel and me, who wanted to shoot photos of wildlife, but from foreign trophy hunters who wanted to shoot guns. Although the Marco Polo sheep is a threatened species, foreigners can pay up to forty thousand dollars to hunt down a pair of enormous curlicue horns in Tajikistan. Ironically, those same horns were scattered across the plateau, the discards of wolf or snow leopard kills. “What the wolves leave behind,” Sergei chuckled, kicking at an old, yellowing pair of horns, “foreigners hang on their walls.”

  And Tajik guides hang photographs of foreigners on their walls, at least judging by Jarty Gumbez, home to the private hunting conservancy Sergei worked for. Its wood-panelled library hosts a billiards table, a big screen TV with a satellite connection, and a shrine of images from successful trophy hunts: triumphant portraits of ruddy-faced men—I saw only one woman—in puffy white camouflage jackets posing next to their prizes. The wild sheep in the photos looked enormous until I realized that the hunters sat a short distance behind them, so that perspective tricked the trophy horns into titanic dimensions. In some images the ram’s teeth were bared in an unsheeplike snarl; in others the ram looked restful, at peace, as though he’d just laid his magnificent head down for a nap.

  A gunshot is a singular, stunning act of violence, which makes trophy hunting easy to condemn, especially when it isn’t for the sake of sustenance, but an ego boost. What’s harder to perceive, never mind prevent, is the less visible, more complicated violence of life in a country with limited options. Chronic poverty in Tajikistan means that wild sheep will be killed no matter what. It’s just a question of who will pull the trigger: Soldiers in the country’s corrupt military, who, Sergei told us, were the only people with guns in Tajikistan following the confiscation of weapons after the civil war? Locals who rent guns from soldiers because they are desperate for meat or the black-market money it brings? Or the occasional foreigner keen on snagging a fancy wall decoration and willing to pay a minor fortune for it?

  Trophy hunting at least gives conservancies like Jarty Gumbez the incentive and the means to protect wild herds of Marco Polo sheep, if only to ensure the sustainability of their business model. A grim calculus, to be sure, but there are worse things than sacrificing an aging ram every few years to subsidize the health of the herd—and of local communities as well, for the conservancy generates a number of well-paid jobs. Of the estimated 23,000 Marco Polo sheep in Tajikistan, it’s no fluke that nearly half live in the Jarty Gumbez conservancy, which does a better job at protecting wildlife than national parks. And when Marco Polo sheep thrive, so do the wolves and snow leopards that eat them, making foreign trophy hunters the unwitting heroes of ecological conservation in Tajikistan.

  I peered at the wall of photographs. The hunters didn’t look so heroic in their white camouflage suits, guns slung across their backs in dark slashes. They looked, it struck me suddenly, like soldiers on Siachen. And I wondered if the conflict in Kashmir was just a distraction, a flashy but misplaced target for my grief over the loss of wildness from the world, the way trophy hunting is easier to denounce than more subtle forms of violence in Tajikistan, such as the poverty that trophy hunting actually helps, in a roundabout way, to ease. After all, glaciers everywhere are vulnerable to the slow devastation of climate change, the war that extravagant lifestyles in North America and Europe are waging daily against ice. The world’s highest and biggest garbage dump isn’t a Himalayan glacier, but the atmosphere above it. In that sense we’re all citizens of the same country, complicit and connected, and the more I stared at the photos, the less convinced I was about what I saw. The creaminess of the Marco Polo sheep wool was just slightly darker than the general whiteness into which they slumped, like shadows cast on snow, if only shadows could bleed. All around them were diffuse crimson smears the precise shade of the Juneau Icefield each summer, when snow algae blooms in pale red sheens across the light-soaked ice, making those glaciers briefly burn.

  The hardest thresholds to cross are rarely as tangible and obvious as a fence. This seemed especially true in Tajikistan, where the only physical barrier Mel and I saw, as we pedalled north past the town of Murghab, was a dilapidated string of barbed wire along the Chinese border. It was missing so many wooden posts you could hop right over it, and judging by the tracks I saw, many humans and animals did. Originally built in the Soviet era to mark the edge of a broad buffer zone with China, this fence became the actual border between the two countries when Tajikistan ceded almost 1 per cent of its territory to China—akin to Canada giving away New Brunswick or the United States ceding Indiana—in order to settle a centuries-old territorial dispute. As far as fences went, rumour had it that other countries in the region planned to follow suit in the name of national security, which seemed absurd when the Pamir range, looming sharp and ragged as broken glass, prevented human trespass better than ba
rbed wire ever could. Mountains and lakes and rivers are the oldest kinds of borders, and maybe the only sort I fully respect.

  The frontier between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan was high on a mountain pass. As we approached it an English-language sign commanded STOP, and on it someone had scrawled, “It’s hammertime.” The border compound looked as though someone had taken a hammer to the place. Dilapidated trailers sagged next to a building that was half-built or half-demolished—it was hard to tell—but either way had an apocalyptic air. A sleepy-looking Tajik soldier materialized from the gloom and stood beside us, inspecting our bikes. Mel’s was propped upright but mine was on the ground, having jettisoned its kickstand a few days earlier. The soldier prodded my bike’s back wheel over and over with his foot to keep it spinning in the air, and with each nudge the gun on his back wobbled slightly.

  After a few minutes an official ushered us inside a dark trailer full of tables half-buried beneath yellowed forms. He gestured for us to sit down by patting the grubby mattress of a bunk bed. As he jotted down details from our passports, another soldier nearby was eating lunch. When he saw us watching he held out his bowl, generously offering to share. “What is it?” Mel inquired. The soldier grinned, then gripped his fingers into the shape of a gun, made a bang, and twirled his hands at his temples as if to convey craziness, someone off his rocker, and the Marco Polo sheep’s trademark curlicue horns.

  10.

  A Mote of Dust Suspended in a Sunbeam

  Tarim Basin and Tibetan Plateau

  As soon as Mel and I had a tentative grip on one country’s language and customs, we left it behind, though in Kyrgyzstan’s case not before a night in national limbo. Neither Tajikistan nor its neighbour apparently felt obliged to maintain the road between their border compounds, for it was a whiplashing plunge of ruts and loose rocks. Marmots sounded shrill alarms from the meadow we eventually camped in, and we expected similar alarms at the Kyrgyz border post the next morning, when the guards squinted suspiciously at our Kazakh visas amended with their country’s name. To our relief they shrugged and stamped us in. If all went well, we’d be stamped out again within thirty-six hours. China was barely a day’s ride away.

  The now-paved road spat us into the Alai Valley, a lush sweep of grass dotted with yurts, horses, and herds of domestic sheep. The mountain range we’d emerged from that morning loomed higher the farther we biked away, an upheaval of white light. On the first and only night we camped in Kyrgyzstan, three teenagers galloped over on horseback, a dead sheep slung over one saddle. The sheep’s throat was slit into a garish red smile and its legs flopped against the horse’s ribs. The Kyrgyz boys—gangly, rail-thin, seared dark by the sun—were friendly and curious, lobbying us with questions and repeating them louder when we didn’t understand, as though translation were a simple function of volume.

  The next day Chinese border officials tried a similar strategy of amplifying decibels in their interrogations at customs, but Mel and I had forgotten most of the Mandarin we’d picked up five years earlier. As we waited for our bikes and panniers to scan through X-ray machines, I idly wondered whether Marco Polo had consulted a phrase book on China’s Silk Road. They were certainly in circulation back in his day, and the similarities between twelfth-century editions and modern incarnations are striking. One Tibetan-Chinese edition I’d read about from Polo’s era provided translations for food, clothing, and tools, as well as expressions for seeking a bed and meal in strange towns. It also included phrases helpful in dealing with common travel problems, such as illness, thievery, or being accused of a crime, including the timeless plea, “What have I done wrong?” In retrospect I wished I’d memorized the Mandarin for that one, for we needed it our first night in China.

  Beyond the border was the trucker’s pit stop of Simuhana, the westernmost town in the country and a place sometimes evocatively referred to as “the last part of China the sun’s rays touch.” When we arrived there, I suspected the sun had its reasons for delay. The town boasted more of everything than similar-sized outposts in Central Asia: people, noise, transport trucks, trash. Its streets were an extravagant squalor. Plastic instant noodle wrappers fluttered in the breeze and crunched underfoot. The main drag was paved in broken glass and the blood of a freshly butchered cow, its carcass hissing with flies on the sidewalk.

  Why we decided to celebrate our return to China by treating ourselves to a guest house stay, I can’t recall, given that whenever we paid to sleep somewhere instead of pitching our tent for free, we typically ended up with insomnia, whether from a hotel faucet that wouldn’t stop dripping (another form of water torture we’d encountered in Turkey) or techno music throbbing through the floorboards from the restaurant below that turned into a disco at night (as had happened in China on our previous trip). But the guest house we found in Simuhana seemed quiet enough. It was run by a family of Uyghurs—pronounced wee-gerz—a Turkic Muslim minority who suffer the same persecution in China as Tibetans, only they lack the equivalent of a Dalai Lama rallying sympathy for their plight abroad. We preferred supporting them to stuffing more yuan in the pockets of Han Chinese, the country’s dominant ethnic group, who have been relocated en masse to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwestern China (just above Tibet) in a policy of calculated resettlement. We also couldn’t wait to eat laghman again, the signature dish of Uyghurs, a spicy tangle of hand-pulled noodles and bell peppers, which we were offered upon arrival at the guest house.

  After dinner the teenage daughter of the guest house owners and the two of us had just settled into watching Uyghur music videos—kohl-eyed young men crooning on sand dunes—when the room exploded into shouts and the stutter of camera flashes. Without a knock at the door, without a hint of courtesy or respect, certainly without a warrant, four uniformed Chinese police officers stormed in, hoping to catch us and our hosts in whatever criminal act we were suspected of: plotting Uyghur rebellion, say, or simply breathing the same air.

  “PASSPORTS!” demanded someone I couldn’t see because I was blinded by camera flashes.

  “Janada, embassy, big problem!” Mel shouted in defiance. She then pretended to dial the Canadian embassy on our cellphone, though we hadn’t bought Chinese SIM cards yet.

  “PASSPORTS!” the police officer bellowed again, calling Mel’s bluff. We never learned exactly what prompted this invasion, but from what we could gather, the guest house owners didn’t have the correct permits for taking in foreigners as clients, which we didn’t realize. Mel and I didn’t want to surrender our passports, so we gave the police photocopies and agreed to visit the station in the morning, knowing that if we skipped town, our hosts, not us, would suffer the consequences. I was relieved when the officers left and the teen girl went back to the music videos, as though a police raid was just business as usual in Simuhana. Maybe in China, for Uyghurs, it was. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well that night.

  At dawn we made our way to the police station. A sheep was getting butchered on the sidewalk where the cow had been yesterday. Uyghur women in long patterned dresses swept dust from the streets, a heroically pointless effort on streets made of compacted dust. Chinese men sent dark jets of phlegm flying from their doorsteps. They wore T-shirts hitched up over the hairless globes of their bellies, either a local style or a tactic to stay cool in the already fierce heat. I heard murmurs of “polis,” “passport,” and “Janada” as we passed them. Mel and I signed our names to some kind of inscrutable statement, testifying to who-knows-what infringements, and skipped town.

  As former American president John F. Kennedy liked to point out, the Chinese word for “crisis” is comprised of two characters, one representing “danger” and the other “opportunity.” An astute and fascinating observation, except for the fact that it isn’t true—which hasn’t stopped management gurus, motivational speakers, and New Age pundits from touting it. The first character in the Chinese word for “crisis,” or wēijī, does imply danger, but while the second appears in “opportunity�
�� it doesn’t signify it, just as the syllable ex doesn’t automatically convey explorer. Instead, the jī character suggests “an incipient moment” or “a crucial turning point.” “Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry,” explains Victor Mair, distinguished professor of Chinese literature. “It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits.”

  When Mel and I reached Kashgar, though, China itself seemed to have embraced the “crisis = danger + opportunity” mistranslation. This oasis city is where the northern and southern routes of the Silk Road meet after skirting the Taklamakan Desert, and it served as a crucial stopover for trade for thousands of years despite repeated sackings, first by Genghis Khan, then Timurlane, and most recently the Chinese government. When we first biked to Kashgar in 2006, the Old City’s maze of mud-and-straw buildings was such an exquisitely preserved example of traditional Islamic architecture that it stood in for 1970s Afghanistan in the film The Kite Runner. Two years later, in 2008, the crisis of an earthquake in distant Sichuan gave the Chinese government an opportunity to raze Kashgar’s historic quarters by claiming them seismically vulnerable. “What country’s government would not protect its citizens from the dangers of natural disaster?” reasoned a Han politician, failing to mention that the Old City’s demolition was a convenient way of marginalizing the Uyghurs who lived there. Frustrated by a lack of peaceful outlets for anti-government protest, some Uyghurs resorted to bombings and knife attacks on Han Chinese police and citizens, to which the government responded with even more force. Each crisis prompted by “Uyghur separatists” served as an excuse for China to tighten its control over disgruntled minorities, as well as contested frontiers, including by paving border roads so that military convoys could more expediently patrol them. Which is why National Highway 219, the rutted, otherworldly track we’d previously biked across the Tibetan Plateau, leading out of Xinjiang and into the equally oppressed TAR, was closed for construction.