The Immeasurable World

by William Atkins

  That night Stein’s assistant and translator, Chiang, came to his tent bearing a bundle of scrolls in Chinese, which Wang had given him in secret, “carefully hidden under his flowing black robe.” Chiang returned in the morning, having spent the night translating the material. Stein was astonished: the scrolls were printed with sutras and colophons that showed they had been brought from India and translated into Chinese by none other than Xuanzang, a coincidence of which Stein believed Wang “in his ignorance could not possibly have had any inkling.”

  The tens of thousands of manuscripts and scrolls, written and printed not only in Chinese but in Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian and Uighur included what would prove to be the world’s earliest printed document, the “Diamond Sutra” from AD 868, as well as numerous tightly folded temple banners and silk paintings from the Tang dynasty. “Nowhere,” wrote Stein, “could I trace the slightest effect of moisture. And, in fact, what better place for preserving such relics could be imagined than a chamber carved in the live rock of these terrifyingly barren hills, and hermetically shut off from what moisture, if any, the atmosphere of the desert valley ever contained?”

  Wang was induced to allow a selection of the manuscripts to be removed to a “temple of learning in Ta-Ying-Kuo” (England), in exchange for a “substantial subscription” to the upkeep of the caves. As Stein remarks upon striking a deal with the priest, “when I surveyed the archaeological value of all I could carry away for this sum, I had good reason to claim it a bargain.”

  When I went there the library cave was empty. Other European and American antiquarians had followed Stein, and its treasures have been dispersed across the world. Only a century ago it had lain in utter darkness, unknown even to Dunhuang’s monks. In his foreword to Biggles in the Gobi Johns writes: “It was implied recently in an American magazine (which should have known better) that Sir Aurel Stein stole some of these books. That is untrue. It is correct that he brought some home with him, for no one on the spot could translate them…But he paid for them with a sum of money sufficient for the Abbot to develop the productivity of the oasis.” A Chinese history of printing published in Beijing in 1961 records that the Diamond Sutra “was stolen over fifty years ago by the Englishman Ssu-t’a-yin, which causes people to gnash their teeth in bitter hatred.”

  Mildred Cable recalled the words of a woman who’d met Stein while he was excavating near her village: “He was searching very hard for something or other, but he never found it. I think it was dragon’s bones to grind down for medicine. He was a nice man, but peculiar. He would never let anyone watch him eat.”

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  ONCE I LEFT behind the cool, swept streets of the tourist city, Dunhuang began to seem like the oasis it was: palm trees and poplars growing from the dust; a verdancy that felt provisional. Turn a corner and, a few kilometres away, pale as a daytime moon, the Mingsha dunes, an immense range known locally as “the mountains.” At the edge of town I climbed the steep slipping flank of a thirty-metre dune, knowing that, to the west, five kilometres away, lay the Crescent Moon Lake, a natural spring ringed by dunes, “small, crescent-shaped and sapphire blue,” according to Cable, who recognised it as a sacred place.

  The dunes extended about twenty-five kilometres west to the Gashun (“bitter”) Gobi, beyond which lay the Lop Desert and the dry lake of Lop Nor, where China’s nuclear-test zone was located. I walked along the dune crests, a foot either side. Finger-sized orange lizards scattered like fish in a boat’s wake. I was conscious that my steps obliterated the cleanness of the line, so that the ridge resembled the crimped edge of a pie—though no sooner had prints been made than they were obliterated. The wind was constant. Sometimes a slope would feel solid as concrete underfoot, then an infinitesimal change in gradient would cause me to sink ankle-deep with every step. I rested astride a dune’s brink, horsemanlike. In a shallow depression, a handful of chaff, helixing in the wind; then a dozen seedheads jostling a couple of metres above my head; suddenly a shadow—a butterfly, cadmium yellow against the near-white sky. There was a low tearing noise, shifting in volume and pitch. And there, maybe a kilometre away, clambering across the flank of a dune—I was not alone: a figure, a man in black.

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  FINALLY ALLOWED TO return to Dunhuang following their summoning by the Baby General, Cable and the Frenches found that Ma’s troops—whose comrades in Ansi they had just been nursing—had turfed them out of their quarters, stolen their best mules and ransacked their medicine chest. Homeless in the Gobi’s midwinter, the women and their small entourage took the road between the “Singing Sand Dunes,” to the Crescent Moon Lake.

  “All around us we saw tier on tier of lofty sand-hills,” Cable wrote, “yet when, with a final desperate effort, we hoisted ourselves over the last ridge and looked down on what lay beyond, we saw the lake below, and its beauty was entrancing.” Adding to the scene’s grandeur was the famous “lui-in” emitted by the surrounding dunes. On one occasion the Trio was “awakened by a sound like a roll of drums.” Fearing attack by brigands, Cable was reassured by the resident priest: “Don’t be anxious, Lady. It is only the drum-roll of our sand-hills. Rest your heart.” It was a phenomenon recorded by Marco Polo when (he tells us) he crossed the Gobi seven hundred years earlier, though he attributed it to “spirits of the desert,” which, he adds, “are said at times to fill the air with the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments, and also of drums and the crash of arms.” Wilfred Thesiger described a “low vibrant hum, which grew in volume until it sounded as though an aeroplane were flying low over our heads,” and Cable reminds us that “we also read of ‘singing sands’ in the Arabian desert where Dr. Bertram Thomas and companions heard a loud noise, which he describes as being like the sound of a ship’s siren.” The sound continued for about two minutes, Thomas reported, “and ended as abruptly as it had begun.” The cause remains unexplained, despite the efforts of scientists. The sand can be coarse or fine, hard-packed or loose, quartz or carbonate, though it occurs only when the surface is disturbed—by someone sliding down the face of a dune, for instance, as the French sisters do in Cable’s description—and in the driest of dunefields. There are two schools of thought as to the cause: the first says it is produced by the vibration of air between sandgrains, the second by the friction of grains one against the other. Harry St. John Philby found he could “play” the dunes using a glass bottle: “I then thrust the bottle deep into the soft, moving, singing sand and, as I drew it out, I noticed a remarkable suctional sound as of a trombone.”

  The noise had gained in volume and pitch; a shadow swept across the arena of sand far below: it was not the lui-in, the “thunder-roll,” but a tourist microlight; and its noise was joined by the growing buzz-roar of dune-buggies. The sand was streaked with their exhaust smut. From the next summit I looked down on a parade of mounted camels fifty strong, filing along the foot of the dunes. It was an ancient scene; apart from the single loudspeaker on its stand beside the camels’ path, its cable snaking away between the dunes, playing Chinese pop; and apart from the riders’ calf-length fluorescent orange booties. You could hire them at the ticket office if you didn’t want sand in your shoes.

  I had an hour before sunset, and veered south, deeper into the desert. After a kilometre or so I had left the noise behind and only the distant humming of the microlights was audible under the wind. And there, on the summit of the dune I was climbing—there he was, the fellow in black, sitting with his back to me, looking out to the horizon. As I got closer I heard that he was singing to himself. Black shirt under a black suit, and flat black office shoes. No dayglo shoe-protectors for him. He was in his thirties, an engineer at the Tuha oilfield in Xinjiang. (I would pass through the Turpan–Hami oilfield the following day on my way to Urumqi.) I asked him if he’d ever heard the lui-in. “You must come when it’s quiet,” he said, “when no one’s here. But someone is always here!”
He laughed. It was Saturday, and this was his leisure-time stroll, a quest for quiet. The municipal desert. I didn’t detain him for long, but every now and then, as I approached the Crescent Moon Lake, we would spot one another across a kilometre-wide dune valley and each raise a hand.

  From the surrounding dunes the lake thirty metres below revealed itself as a kidney-shaped slick presided over by a pagoda tower and modern pavilions. As dusk approached, the temple was still busy with visitors. It was no longer possible to stay there, as Cable had a hundred years ago, but such was the immensity of its setting, a hundred coach-loads of bright-bootied tourists wouldn’t have diminished the tranquillity. Between the terrace and the water was a band of rushes and desert willows, and as I settled on the steps that led to the shore I became aware of sounds I hadn’t heard since I was in England: chatter of finches, lapping of water, kids. It was here on the banks of the Crescent Moon Lake that Cable “began to see that the acceptance of a severe rule of life is an integral part of the absolute freedom which is theirs whom He makes free.” The life, in other words, that had been promised to her all those years ago: privation, toil and loneliness. Recalling her arrival in the desert fifteen years earlier, far from “conventional, snobbish” England, Cable wrote: “My first feeling had been a sense of liberation which was intoxicating. I threw up my arms as if to take flight, saying: ‘I have the freedom of the spaces and I can go anywhere.’ ”

  Bertram Thomas, when he left Arabia, drank himself to death back in England, in the house he’d been born in. For Cable and the French sisters, it was a 1936 decree against foreigners that finally forced them to abandon the Gobi. The Trio moved together to a hamlet in rural Dorset, to a house called Willow Cottage. Where could be more pastoral-sounding, more English? Jasmine, honeysuckle and mignonette bloomed in the garden. Cable died in 1952, aged seventy-four; the sisters within a month of each other, six years later. The dream of home had never quite been quellable. But sometimes in Willow Cottage, thinking of the “thunder roll” of the Mingsha dunes, Cable tells us—whether we believe her is immaterial—she would “take up a handful of Crescent Lake sand, and try to make it sing.”

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  AS SEPTEMBER BECAME October, I went west, over the border from Gansu Province into Xinjiang. Around this time, another hostage video was uploaded to the internet. To the layman the setting could have been any dry and rocky place: a pale grey-beige dustland, and apart from a few fist-sized volcanic rocks, quite featureless—selected, indeed, for that very feature: its featurelessness. It had nevertheless been identified by U.S. military geographers as a certain tract near a certain Syrian town being held by the militants. It was a backdrop, but it was more than that. Death was a slim creature, almost svelte, standing wide-legged and costumed in snug black battle-wear, black from head to foot. Only the pale slits of his eyes were exposed. Part of his horror was his affectedness. Before him, kneeling as if at an altar, the white man, standing in for all white men, shorn, pale from lightlessness and stress, and attired as always in the vestments of today’s political prisoner: the oversized fluorescent orange jumpsuit. Death’s hands, unlike his captive’s, were free, and in one of them he held, almost casually, like a decorator’s brush, his knife. I had recently read a Russian soldier’s account of his time in Afghanistan in the 1980s in which he observed that the colour of blood on sand, once it has dried, is not red-brown but grey.

  It was partly this association—between blood and sand, which is to say life and death—that accounted for the anxiety I felt as I travelled to Urumqi to catch my flight to Hotan. I wasn’t much soothed, true, by the fact the train was full of teenage soldiers rampaging up and down the corridors, queuing for the samovar, queuing for the toilets, smoking in the vestibules. All of them were crew-cut and wearing camouflage T-shirts and baggy green trousers tied off with a ribbon at each ankle.

  Pinned to their T-shirts was a badge bearing the initials CAPF. Not, in fact, strictly soldiers, then, but the new intake of the People’s Armed Police, whose primary mission was “internal security.” It turned out they too were going to Urumqi. The excitement was infectious—the excitement of those heading to a front line.

  The new railway line to Xinjiang, the so-called New Silk Road, was still being tested. It could sometimes be seen running alongside the old line. It had cost $23 billion dollars and would cut the journey-time between Lanzhou and Urumqi from twenty hours to eight. There was talk of its being extended to Kashgar in the far west, into Uzbekistan and as far as Turkey and Bulgaria. The vice-chairman of Xinjiang’s regional government had said: “Xinjiang will be the biggest beneficiary of the Silk Road. It will help it open up further, increase trade, tourism and other exchanges with neighbouring countries.” An official in Xinjiang’s Development and Reform Commission stated that a branch to Hotan, my destination, would “help the ethnic groups become more open and modern…We can’t leave them alone just because their way of thinking is backwards.”

  Above the constant thump-thump of the train were the occasional Tannoy announcement and panpipe covers of Lloyd Webber favourites, and the clamour of the CAPF boys. Meanwhile the desert rolled out on either side. Each time one of the boys passed my compartment he’d pause and dip his shorn head for a better look, and I would raise a hand and say hello. Then, from behind, a shove and a boot in the arse from his friend, and he’d be gone up the corridor. After an hour or more of this, two of them came and spoke to me, sitting, arms over each other’s shoulders, on the foot of my bunk. We exchanged a few words, and they went away and came back with two of their fellow recruits, with whom I had the same conversation, and these two in turn fetched two more, and so on, until the whole compartment was full of them, ten, twelve, crammed onto the lower bunks, legs dangling from the upper ones. They were dressed identically, heads shaven, but the effect of this uniformity was less to diminish than to emphasise individuality—faces, physiques, posture. They wore digital camouflage, the most effective camouflage for desert conditions. What they had in common was that they were without exception ethnic Han Chinese. Did they know that they were being posted to Urumqi as the trial of Ilham Tohti was beginning? It would have been unwise to ask. Ilham was an economics professor, a scholar of Uighur culture, and an advocate of Uighur rights in Xinjiang. You could hardly call him a radical, he was scarcely even a spokesman: his misdeed had been to question publicly the official response—violent suppression, mass imprisonment, “crackdown”—to recent street protests by Uighurs in Xinjiang.

  The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region is China’s largest administrative division: 1.66 million square kilometres—Germany, France and Italy combined. In the south are the Kunlun Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau; in the north, the Altai Mountains and Mongolia. The province is split horizontally by the Tienshan—the Heavenly Mountains—north of which lies the fertile Jungar Basin. Occupying the south of the province, below the Heavenly Mountains, is another basin, the Tarim, which is dominated by the Taklamakan Desert, my destination: 327,000 square kilometres of sand, where annual precipitation can be as low as ten millimetres. One cause of this aridity is the Tibetan Plateau, which acts as a barrier against the Indian monsoons. But the dryness of Xinjiang is also a product of its sheer isolation: few places on earth are further from the sea. The nearest body of water to the capital Urumqi, the East China Sea, is around 2,500 kilometres east. The region’s ailing tourist industry attempts to make a virtue of these superlatives: furthest, driest, hottest, highest, lowest…

  For centuries the Chinese called it Huijiang: “Muslim Land.” Only in 1884, with its reconquest by the Qing following a local revolt, was this fragmented region incorporated as a province and the official Chinese name changed to Xinjiang. Today veils and beards (among the young, at least) are outlawed, and state employees and students are banned from fasting during Ramadan. On the doors of mosques there were signs prohibiting entry to men under eighteen. In January Ilham Tohti had been ta
ken from his home in Beijing to Urumqi, where he was held in shackles and denied halal food. Eat what you’re given. He ate nothing for ten days. In July the charge was announced: “separatism.” He was the founder of a website that—to quote the police—had been used to “make rumours, distort and hype up issues in a bid to create conflicts, spread separatist thinking, incite ethnic hatred, advocate ‘Xinjiang independence’ and conduct separatist activities.” His attitude, the state news agency reported, “was utterly vile, and therefore he should be heavily punished.”

  The boys started, two by two, leaving my compartment and returning with gifts: a handful of nuts, a sachet of instant chai, a cigarette proffered from a Tupperware box. They rolled up their sleeves to show their biceps and performed muscle-man poses. I did the same. They came from Shanxi, five hundred kilometres east of Jiayuguan, they said; some of them had known each other since school. No, they had never been to Urumqi before. Had never left Shanxi. They were not sure exactly what they would be doing, but one of them thought training. He made as if to fire a machine-gun, and did the noise; the others followed, until the whole compartment was full of these good-natured lads firing at one another and imitating the noise of automatic gunfire, a sound I doubted they’d heard outside Call of Duty.

  Warning Mildred Cable against entering the Black Gobi, a soldier told her, “everyone fears that place.” Owen Lattimore, passing this way in 1927, describes a “desert of black gravel…like shattered slate in formation, laid thickly over yellow sandy clay.” The cause of the blackness is “desert varnish,” a micrometre-thin rind of windblown clay and manganese that accrues, over the course of millennia, on the exposed surface of desert stones. A stone picked up from a desert plain might be pale underneath and near-black on top. Occasionally, from the train window, paler underlying sediment was exposed where a flash flood had washed away the black gravel, or in parallel looping tracks where a vehicle had passed perhaps years before.