“Fixed on the objective, which was neither ease, pleasure, fun nor self-expression,” Mildred began her training at the CIM Candidates Home in London. The “Principles and Practice of the China Inland Mission” was known to younger members as the Document of Serfdom. Members, it said, must “be prepared to live lives of privation, of toil, of loneliness, of danger—to be looked down upon by their own countrymen and to be despised by the Chinese; to live in the interior, far from the comforts and advantages of society and protection such as they have enjoyed at home.”
It seems that Cable had planned to go to China with her husband-to-be. But he reneged. He is referred to only obliquely in her writings, as an absence. Was there an ultimatum? Was it the work itself he renounced, or the marriage? “On a beautiful May morning, when the lilac was in bloom,” she remembers in an autobiography, she received “a letter in which that was written which made a goblin of the sun.” She broke off the engagement and told herself she would never trust anyone again. But she would go. On 25 September 1901, in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, this unhappy person sailed for China. It was not merely a compulsion; it was escape, and her desert years became the perfect extension of that flight.
When Cable arrived in China, aged twenty-two, Evangeline French, ten years older, had been in her own post for nine years. Meeting the new arrival in Huozhou, a city in the northern province of Shanxi, French wondered: “What possessed them to send such a frail child to our hard inland conditions?” Gansu and Xinjiang, where they would be going, lay a thousand kilometres and more to the west, as far from the sea as any place on earth.
But if the girl appeared frail it was only the strain of the journey and the bleak years that preceded it. She was steely, and throughout her writings you sense an unwillingness to yield to mere circumstances. By some—for instance gentlemen of the Bible Society back in faraway Shanghai—she would become known as “Napoleon.”
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I WAS BEGINNING to feel there was no way to travel but in the footsteps of others. In early autumn I booked a flight to Shanghai and from there flew 2,250 kilometres west to Jiayuguan, a city on the edge of the Gobi Desert in the province of Gansu. I stayed in a business hotel in a room whose floor, walls and ceiling were lined with the same white glossy laminate, as if designed to be hosed down between guests. Cable found Jiayuguan an unhappy place, besieged by the desert, its people either introverted into lethargy by the horrors beyond the walls, or compelled to violence. “There is nothing to do here all day but sit and listen to that howling wind,” the local women told her. The miller’s beaten wife killed herself by eating a box of matches; the blacksmith’s son was “so profligate that his father took a sledge-hammer and crushed his head as he lay asleep.”
A century and more later the mood had changed. Under my window was a beauty parlour, whose dozen employees would file every morning onto the street in front of the store and, accompanied by shrill pop music, perform a synchronised dance in five parts, before one of them unfurled and lit a belt of firecrackers that exploded over the course of a minute, the manicurists vanishing into the smoke.
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THE HEXI CORRIDOR is China’s throat, a 1,200-kilometre pass squeezed between the Tibetan Plateau to the south and the Mongolian Gobi to the north. It follows a chain of oases westward from the city of Lanzhou, through Gansu to that province’s border with the far-western “autonomous region” of Xinjiang. It was at the so-called “Barrier of the Pleasant Valley” in Gansu, where the corridor narrows to just fifteen kilometres between mountain ranges, that the Jiayuguan fort was built in 1372, soon after the new Ming dynasty had driven the last of the Yuan-dynasty armies into the desert. A slammed door.
The fort lies outside the modern city of Jiayuguan, in the “Great Wall Culture and Tourism Zone.” Its pale, battlemented walls are surmounted by tiered watchtowers with red-tiled roofs. There were few tourists, and I was the only non-Chinese. From the ramparts you comprehended the setting—how the fort guarded the pass against the desert. It was to repel raids by nomads, ancestors of the Huns, that this stretch of the Great Wall was built in 221 BC. To the north were the dark Mazong Mountains, to the south the Qilian Mountains. Between the two, bracketed by the wall like a locket on a chain, stood the fort. Only the southern, final, stretch of the wall still stands; you can follow it to the ravine of the Badai River—beyond which the mountains of the Qilian massif are visible through the dust hanging in the air. If you were to leave or enter China’s heartland via the west, it had to be through this single channel.
The fort has three gates, Cable explains: to the east, the Gate of Enlightenment, through which I had entered the fort; to the south, the Gate of Conciliation; finally, facing west, the Gate of Sorrows. Passing through the Gate of Sorrows I came to a paved incline that appeared to lead only to the sky. This was the exiles’ gate, the entrance to the desert, and when Cable was here the parting words of the banished could still be made out, scratched on the walls – “inspired by sorrow too heavy for the careful balance of literary values, yet unbearable unless expressed in words.”
To emerge from the unlit tunnel, fifteen metres long and five high, and set foot on that short slope was to go from an intimate, temple quiet to unbounded silence—from cool to heat, stillness to breeze, from shade into searing light. Another world, and the end of your old life. At the top of the slope I looked back east, to the tunnel I’d emerged from, a dark aperture echoing with unseen footsteps, and the fortress whose ten-metre-high wall the tunnel penetrated, with its battlements and bowmen’s turrets. I turned the other way, west. West was the Gobi, a rugged, ash-coloured plain coated with grit and low clumps of tamarisk and camel thorn. I thought of the lake and the willows scarcely two hundred metres away on the other side of the fort.
Ahead was a complex of wooden huts (a noodle shop, workshops, toilets), a row of quad-bikes on which tourists could roar around a flag-marked circuit, a shooting range where you could fire a tripod-mounted M16 into the emptiness (west has always been the direction of fire), a mechanical “bucking bronco” under a striped awning and, couched in the sand, eight live camels, sleepily waiting for tourists, like donkeys on an English beach. Their saddles were draped in matching quilts of floral velour, and their eyes serenely closed as if they were listening to a new interpretation of a favourite piece of music. “An undomesticated and savage animal,” William Palgrave claimed. It is the imperiousness of camels that people dislike; and it is that imperiousness—that they will not be cowed and cannot be humiliated—that I love.
The M16 squatted unsupervised under its awning. Nobody was riding the bucking bronco or the camels or the quad-bikes. Their proprietors were sleeping, the camel man on a bench, his forearm across his eyes; another was sprawled across the saddles of two quad-bikes. A woman in a yellow jumpsuit with a matching yellow headscarf and facemask sat hunched over an ice-cream chest. She opened the chest and I saw that it contained nothing but bags full of ice cubes. I bought one, and swinging it in one fist, set out into the Gobi.
The explorer Owen Lattimore, writing of his travels in Inner Mongolia in 1927, delineates the Gobi vaguely: “running, on its longer axis, east and west between Outer and Inner Mongolia…it takes an incline south and west, spreading out until it reaches the limits of the Taklamakan.” Mildred Cable allowed “Gobi” to stand for the entire extent of her range, from Jiayuguan as far as Urumqi, 1,500 kilometres west. “Gobi” is not only a proper name, however; it’s also used locally for the flat sand-and-gravel plains that are distinct from the sand-dune desert of the Taklamakan or the salt-lake desert of Lop Nor. It was impossible to know where one named desert ended and the next began, where “Gobi” became “Black Gobi,” where “Gashun Gobi” degenerated into the Kumtag Desert and the salt-fields of Lop Nor, where the threshold was between Lop Nor—a body of water until it was drained last century—and the Taklamakan. And no soone
r had I established that one desert lay here and another there, or that this one abutted that, than I read or was told that, no, the Black Gobi ends here and the Gashun Gobi is not there, but five hundred kilometres north.
Behind me, beyond the fort, the smoke-churning skyline of Jiayuguan city was visible—coke, cement, fertiliser, the raw material provisioned, like the region’s water, by the surrounding mountains. The clinking of a freight train three kilometres away became audible. Under the final stretch of the Great Wall a few kilometres south, a road ran to the border with Xinjiang, flanked by the railways—the old line to Kashgar a thousand kilometres away, and the new high-speed bullet-train line, yet to be opened, that would rush Han Chinese passengers westwards.
Everywhere half-buried scraps of polythene were shivering in the breeze. The place was a dumping ground, as the desert’s shore always is, wherever it is accessible and unpoliced. A solitary Christian grave could be made out, with its double headstone, epitaphs sand-scoured to illegibility. Here and there darker stones had been arranged to form Chinese characters. In a land so mobile there are few forms of writing assured of greater permanence, and Cable describes leaving lines of scripture on Gobi hillsides using the same method. For my own part I collected a handful of brown pebbles and arranged them to form an arrow pointing back the way I’d come. You couldn’t be too careful.
To the south, the wall proceeded to its terminus seven kilometres away. It remained awesome, insurmountable: the ground dug up and wetted and stamped into a mould, drying to a hardness that has persisted, in places, for two thousand years. And yet from a distance it didn’t look ancient; being a kind of concrete, it resembled the concrete walls built to defend the land against the sea, or the European border fortifications of the world wars, or the wall separating the Occupied Territories from Israel. Surrounding the fort there had once been a moat—tiantian—containing not water but fine sand raked daily to betray the footprints of deserters. But according to Cable nothing would induce the soldiers garrisoned there to enter the desert beyond the Gate of Sorrows. “Demons, they are the ones who inhabit the Gobi.” Cable conceded it was desolate: “but in the silence and solitude God is still there.”
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SHE AND EVA FRENCH were scarcely apart from the time they met in 1901 until Cable’s death in 1952. Evangeline French was born in Algeria and educated in Geneva with her younger sister, Francesca. According to the women’s peculiar, third-person group autobiography, “Personal friendships were slightly scorned in the too strong mental atmosphere of Evangeline’s home, where anything approaching to sentimentality was anathema.” She herself was “robustuous,” “obstreperous” and “rebellious” and “convinced that there was something so essentially wrong with the world that nothing but revolution could set it right.” When in 1891 the family moved from radical Geneva to staid, working-class Portsmouth, Eva and Francesca were miserable. “For a young lady to hold strong opinions, to be revolutionary in outlook and unusual in small ways, was sufficient to bring her under suspicion.”
It was seven years later when, established in Pingyao, Shanxi Province, Eva passed a man hoeing at the roadside. He stopped his work, stood to his full height, and drew a slow finger across his throat. The Boxer Rebellion began in 1898 in northern China. The mantra of its adherents was “Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners.” The focus of the unrest was Shanxi, and by the end of 1900, some two thousand Chinese Christians had been murdered there, along with dozens of foreign missionaries and their families. Among the dead, “hacked to pieces,” was Miss Emily Wiltshire, who had encouraged Mildred to join the CIM. In early July 1900 Eva was in the city of Jiexiu when the mission station was attacked by Boxers chanting “Kill! Kill the foreign devils! Kill!” Back home in Britain her mother opened a newspaper to see Eva’s name among the dead.
In Geneva, while Eva climbed a tree, Francesca would be sitting in its shade with a book. In later life she disdained “the exaggerated or inexact use of words.” Her rigour is discernible in the writings jointly credited to her and Cable. She came to believe that “self-expression may easily be a dissipation of strength which, stored and controlled, might accumulate sufficiently to accomplish great things.” Her terrifying task was to tame herself in the glorification of God.
During her older sister’s long absence, it was she who had cared for their ailing mother. Soon after the announcement of Eva’s death, a telegram was delivered: “Your daughter arrived Hangchow safe.” Eva had survived the Boxer attack. Shortly before their mother’s death in 1908 she returned to England for a furlough, accompanied by Mildred Cable. When they left once more for China, they were joined by Francesca, forming the party that would come to be known by the people of the desert as the Trio: “the three-in-one venerable teachers of righteousness.”
In The Gobi Desert, which she co-authored with Francesca French, there is a photo of Cable on arrival in Ansi (a city she hated): she’s in a dusty courtyard, seated on bales of cotton surrounded by weary camels. She is quite at home, some great ruler enthroned. Napoleon.
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THE SILK ROAD: not a Chinese term, but the nineteenth-century coining of a German geographer, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen. Yes, silk went this way, east–west, but also much more: paper, jade, ivory, ceramics, tea, medicine, furs, textiles and precious metals. Nor was there only a single route, a superhighway, but rather a shifting network of hundreds of tracks, flanking the Taklamakan Desert and twining from east to west between China and—ultimately, so distant as to be unimaginable—Rome.
It was early September 1931 when Cable and the Frenches and their small entourage set out west from their base near Jiayuguan for the oasis of Dunhuang, in the far west of Gansu. “The Dunhuang journey will occupy at least two months and after that we cannot tell where the Pillar of Fire may lead us.” At Dunhuang, Silk Road travellers would prepare for the perils ahead; to ready your spirit was a task no less vital than readying your caravan. Dunhuang huddled on the edge of oblivion, at the point where the southern Silk Road crossed the great north–south passage between Mongolia and Lhasa. Even for the seasoned desert traveller the voyage west was one from which return was uncertain. There were at Dunhuang the famous Mogao Caves, the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, where prayers would be made, first on behalf of the outward-setting traveller, to protect them against the western wastes; and then, supposing they returned, to give thanks.
My train was crossing the eggshell-coloured plain I’d walked the day before, the easternmost edge of the Gobi. As the train moved west between the mountains, the fort and the remnant Great Wall were briefly visible in the distance, and, hanging over the horizon, the city’s haze of pollution. Within forty minutes, habitation and cultivation were left behind, and the only human features of the desert were the endless pylons, gleaming as if new—squatting, hunched or marching humanoids—and the trappings of the railway itself, in the form of fencing, culverts and hills of soil dug a half-century ago. To repel sand the line was flanked by railway-sleeper walls and sawtooth concrete buttresses and by withered ranks of desert poplars. Several times a year the line has to be closed while drifts are cleared. It is the perpetual confrontation of the occupied desert.
The Gobi was not a place of dunes but of flat expanses broken only by low hills and shallow basins and dried riverbeds. The action of water was everywhere visible, even where water itself had not flowed for decades or centuries. The flatness was limitless, or rather limited only by the horizon, or by visibility, the extent of the air’s clarity. In my bunk I listened to the low, cardiac double thump of the rails, and this alone gave me any sense of motion; the terrain outside told you next to nothing. Every twenty minutes or so I sat up in my bunk to look at the desert on either side—through the window in my cabin and the one across the corridor—feeling that I was missing something; but the view scarcely altered in character from hour to hour, identical, it see
med, on each side of the train. It was like being on a treadmill. The slightest variation—a darkening or lightening of the desert surface, a clustering of pylons or wind turbines, a derelict cement factory, the threaded bed of a dried-out stream, a rink of inflorescent salt, a dispersal of bones—was enough to arrest the attention. Otherwise, to watch the passing landscape for more than a few minutes required an effort of will: it was partly the weariness of imagining yourself crossing this landscape on foot. Cable, on first encountering the Gobi, asked herself if she might die—“not, as some had done, of thirst or fatigue, but of boredom.”
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OF THE FOREIGN witnesses to the Hami Rebellion of 1931 few were closer than Cable and the Frenches. The rebellion, which spread across north-west China, followed the Chinese decision to abolish the ancient Muslim khanate of Hami following the death in 1930 of the last khan. With the end of the khanate came an influx of Han migrants (overwhelmingly China’s dominant ethnic group) to the largely Muslim city, which stood in Xinjiang, just over the border from Gansu Province, and a hundred kilometres north of Dunhuang. The new regime exempted the migrants from taxes and handed them land that had formerly been farmed by Muslim Uighurs, the largest ethnic minority in Xinjiang. At the same time, Uighurs found that their agricultural taxes doubled, while in compensation for their fields they received unimproved, unirrigated land on the desert’s edge. The spark was the marriage of a Han Chinese tax collector to a Uighur woman. At the wedding party, the newlyweds were killed (“with horrible ferocity,” according to Cable) by a mob that went on to murder a hundred Gansu families. Their heads were buried in the fertile soil of the fields expropriated on their behalf.
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