The train slowed interminably, then halted. I sat up. Scattered across the desert, governing the landscape entirely, dozens of twenty-metre-tall drilling rigs, the Tuha oilfield mentioned by my friend in Dunhuang, and between them, moving with an up-down regularity that seemed both inexorable and primordial—primordial as the workings of the heart—hundreds of the oil-pumps known in the West as nodding donkeys, and in China as ketouji: “kowtowing machines.” From the Selected Works of Mao: “We say China is a country vast in territory, rich in resources and large in population; as a matter of fact, it is the Han nationality whose population is large and the minority nationalities whose territory is vast and whose resources are rich.” Black on the surface, black beneath.
* * *
—
AT URUMQI I caught a flight to the city of Hotan on the southern edge of the Taklamakan. I watched from the window as the glaciers of the Tienshan sloped abruptly to desert, vertical to horizontal, solid to particulate—and then nothing but diffuse beige sand, as uniform as the dark blue of space overhead. After an hour a thread of green emerged, a river, leading to a city pressed on all sides, it seemed, as we circled: between the two rivers running east–west, and between the desert to the north and the mountains to the south.
It is from the Tarim Basin’s bounding mountains that most of the Taklamakan’s sand is winnowed. In Hotan, dust hung in the air as in the minutes after a demolition; it made everything vague and insubstantial. I had a strange sense of the city disintegrating. “Nobody cares!” is what Absalom, whom I met at the airport, said as we buzzed about on his scooter or sprinted across roads. The only way to stop traffic as a pedestrian was to walk in front of it, he explained. “Nobody cares.” At the airport he’d offered to act as my guide, and since I liked him and he was cheap, I agreed. Absalom was not his name, but it is the name I think of, now, when I picture him. He was young, educated, though his English was self-taught. His first language was Uighur, his second Chinese. Throughout the week or so I spent with him he wore the same blue jeans and navy-blue sweater, a canvas satchel slung across his back. His favourite things were ice cream and computer games, and several times we went to a parlour near Hotan’s main square, where we sat down to glutinous cream-less sundaes among the city’s better-off youth.
Founded by immigrants from India around 200 BC, Hotan was a major Buddhist city state and remained a centre of Buddhism until 1006 when it fell to the Muslim khanate of Kashgar. The Islamisation of what is now Xinjiang was triggered in 950 by the conversion of Satuq Bughra Khan. According to legend, he met a talking rabbit, which turned into a sheikh and bade him repeat “There is no god but God, and Mohammed is his prophet.” Satuq promptly ousted (and beheaded) his father, the Bughra Khan. Oasis by oasis, Islam replaced Buddhism, hastened by Sufi missionaries. By the seventeenth century, Xinjiang was largely Muslim. The Huijiang Zhi, a Chinese history of the region composed in 1772, recorded: “Muslims’ natural character is suspicious and unsettled, crafty and false.” Nevertheless, while “hard-drinking and addicted to sex,” they were able to “endure hunger and cold, and will take any insult.” In common with most Chinese names for “barbarian,” the written character for “Muslim,” Hui, until recently contained the canine radical, the sign for “dog.” Hotan maintains its reputation for obduracy. In Unity Square armed police stood under a dull statue the colour of wet clay depicting a bowed Uighur peasant shaking hands with a man who has the distracted air of one thinking about his lunch—Mao. The peasant was Kurban Talum, a symbol of ethnic unity favoured by Beijing.
The city is situated between two rivers, the Yurnkash (White Jade) and the Karakash (Black Jade), which converge to its north, exhausting themselves in the Taklamakan as the Hotan River, whose green-brown thread my flight from Urumqi had followed. Jade continues to be eked from the rivers and the Kunlun Mountains. If you see a BMW, Absalom said, it belongs to an official; if you see a Land Cruiser it belongs to a jade dealer. In either case, keep your distance.
* * *
—
OUTSIDE THE JADE MARKET on the bank of the Yurnkash next morning an ox was being trussed. The scene was watched by four uniformed CAPF men who stood in formation under an awning, one in the centre resting the tip of a studded lathi between his feet, the others clutching their automatic rifles in an outward-facing ring around him. They stood like statuary or ghosts, unseen among the throng, and unhappy, it seemed to me, as ghosts are said to be. The ox bucked, once, against its restraints. Behind the jade market’s iron fence hundreds of men surged between stalls as if subject to underwater currents. Some of the stalls were loaded with boulders of jade as big as a person’s head; others were scattered with no more than a handful of tinted shingle, black, white, green, gleaned from the broad bed of the White Jade River that ran alongside. Each stallholder constantly sprayed water from a plastic mister to heighten the jade’s shine so that even among the heat of the crowd the market was the coolest place in the city. I bought a single pebble of green jade, the size, shape and texture of an earlobe. It would be my talisman. When I looked at it again later, in my hotel room, its gloss had dried to the dull finish of sea glass.
Released from the crowd, I stood outside under the brazen sun and there was the ox still, all four legs trussed with a single knot, while a man stooping over it sawed at its throat with a knife that seemed too short for the purpose. The ox, kicking its four trussed legs as one, silently released its blood onto the road. All of this was watched by three captivated toddlers. There was nothing appalling about it; it could hardly be described as violence: the ox seemed like a participant. The man went on sawing. I turned away and walked back to my hotel, past the policemen under their gazebo.
* * *
—
SINCE 11 SEPTEMBER 2001, Beijing has characterised Xinjiang as merely another front in the global struggle against militant Islam. Its actions there, it explains, constitute nothing more than the commensurate duties of any responsible government. Even those living in the towns and cities where riots or demonstrations or massacres had happened were denied the facts. Two? One hundred? Two thousand killed? And by whom? Han or Uighur, civilian or police or army? There was little news, and when such information as existed seeped out, officially or underground, it was liable the next day to be revised by the authorities, or withdrawn or gainsaid.
In Urumqi, where Ilham Tohti’s trial was commencing, there had been a commotion as I left the station for my flight to Hotan, the turning of heads, a crowd gathering. I saw a man, a Uighur, yell and raise a fist to a Han policeman and strike him in the jaw. The policeman only turned his head with a frown, as if to avoid a disagreeable draught, replying with a temple-blow that knocked his assailant unconscious.
But the police presence in Hotan was experienced less as a force of law than as an occupation. The wailing of sirens was continual but did not indicate urgency: the white or black police vans moved at walking pace up and down the dusty streets, sirens blaring, and nobody drove too close or overtook.
In the bazaar the next morning the stallholders were opening the grates of their stalls and laying out their wares. Metalworkers and wood-turners; rug merchants and grape-vendors. Even at this cool hour the cuts hanging at the meat stalls were as thickly infested with flies as a hive’s combs with bees. In front of each such stall on the ground was the head of a horse. They had been freshly removed, but there was no blood. The eyes were closed. The tongue lolled, as if it had been slipped out deliberately, as if it were part of the trader’s routine to lay out each morning, like a signboard, this symbol of his trade—a finger pushed between the bared teeth, the tongue hooked out. The tongue was not glossy or pink, but had already been dulled by the dust in the air. This in turn made me conscious of my own tongue, and the chalky taste that had been discernible even indoors, even at night with the windows closed and the air conditioning off.
The oases of the southern Taklamakan have always been dusty
—the lungs of two-thousand-year-old desert mummies are clogged with it—but there was an understanding among those I spoke to that the increased frequency of the dust storms, more than two hundred days per year, was due to human activity. Xinjiang’s five hundred reservoirs contain some 8.5 billion cubic metres of water, more than the total annual discharge of the region’s rivers. Ninety-six per cent of water-use in Xinjiang is agricultural. Following China’s economic reforms in 1978, huge areas of cotton were planted across the region, cotton being a lover of sunshine and sandy soil. Since cotton consumes great quantities of water, the effect in a region so arid was inevitable: rivers ceased to flow, the forests of poplars they sustained died, farms were surrendered to the sand.
It has been estimated that desertification affects a sixth of humankind and 70 per cent of all arid areas. The image often given is the desert “marching” on the fertile land, advancing like a necrosis. But this is to misunderstand the process. The main causes are unregulated irrigation, overgrazing and deforestation. The desert has neither hunger nor jealousy, but in forcing resources from impoverished soil, we render that ground not only unproductive but antibiotic. “Desertification,” in fact, is a misnomer, for whereas the natural desert—le désert absolu, so to speak—is, for all its superficial minimalism, a network of largely self-regulating equilibria (think of the sand at first light, crisscrossed with tracks), desertified regions more closely approach desert in the original Latin sense: not just impoverished but forsaken. A desertified landscape is not a desert landscape but rather a zone of human making, and often the result of our inability to reconcile ourselves to the arid.
Lop Nor, once China’s second largest salt lake, has all but dried up due to the diversion and damming of its source river, the Tarim. The Crescent Moon Lake, celebrated since antiquity for its miraculous permanence, is shrinking as industry and agriculture day by day exhaust its aquifer. The earth having been denuded of vegetation, the dust that has settled on the desert edge over millions of years can simply be swept up by the wind. Nor have the effects been confined to Xinjiang—and this was of some satisfaction to Absalom; each spring, he said, Beijing, the seat of government, was choked by this curse from the insalubrious west.
* * *
—
THE TRANSLATION OF “Taklamakan” favoured by Western explorers—“You go in and you don’t come out”—bemuses the locals. It’s known that the name was given to at least one of the desert’s sand-drowned cities, and it’s possible that it was just extended to the desert itself. “Old home place,” some say; or “end place”; or “place of grapes.” One theory is that Taklamakan is a Uighur form of the Arabic for “leave alone”; another associates it with toghrak, the Turkic word for the desert poplar. A modern British adventurer who crossed the desert east to west titled his account The Worst Desert on Earth. “It was mine,” he wrote, in 1995: “I was its conqueror and my footsteps would strip the virginity from the ruffled layers of sand.” My emphasis.
But it is an earlier account that served to mythologise the Taklamakan in the Western mind as a place as fearsome as any frozen Pole. In the collection of the Royal Geographical Society is a measuring tape, its case inscribed as follows:
LEFT BY DR SVEN HEDIN MARCH 1901 NORTH OF LOP NOR, CENTRAL ASIA FOUND DECEMBER 23 1906 BY DR M. A. AUREL STEIN
The Swedish explorer Hedin made an earlier expedition into the Taklamakan in 1895, having just turned thirty. He and Stein met only once—at a dinner at the RGS in 1909, Stein handed the recovered tape to a delighted Hedin. Hedin’s maps had proven invaluable to Stein, just as Stein’s would be to later travellers, but Stein in turn did Hedin the service of verifying the accuracy (unerring) of the measurements he’d taken. Hedin’s 1895 expedition was to cross the Taklamakan from south to north. This first venture was almost Hedin’s last; and the horrors he endured shaped both his own reputation and the Western image of the Taklamakan. Of the four local men who ventured into the desert with him, according to his account, only two returned. “To my eyes,” he wrote, as they set out from Merket, on the western boundary of the desert, “the desert ocean was invested with a fascinating beauty. Its silence, its unbroken stillness, exercised a magic charm over me.” It was a charm that, for Hedin, even the events of the coming weeks were hardly to diminish—he rhapsodises the desert even as he lies dying. “I knew nothing of hesitation, nothing of fear,” he wrote, words echoed by Harry St. John Philby as he faced death in the Empty Quarter thirty-five years later: “I would not, could not yield.”
Hedin’s account reminds us that sand is not merely sand, but to the desert traveller an element as mobile and impulsive as water. He glosses the Uighur names for the high dunes they must cross as they move deeper into the desert: ighiz-kum: “high sand”; chong-kum: “big sand”; and, increasingly as they move north, yaman-kum: “hateful sand.” Fifteen days into their journey to the desert’s northern edge he realised that his men had brought water for only two more days. But assured by his guide, Yolchi, that the River Hotan was within two days’ reach, the party continued. At least that is what Hedin tells us. A frisson of “hesitation” or “fear” might have served him well. “What suffering, what loss, what sorrow would have been spared both to ourselves and to others if we had retraced our steps.” But such a reversal, even in the face of unmistakable death, would have been anathema to him.
They were being slowly killed by the desert, he felt, and yet “deeper Sabbath peace never brooded over any graveyard.” As they negotiate dunes sixty metres high, one of the men cries “Karga! Karga!” and points to the sky: a lone raven, circling the caravan. Then the skeleton of a vole; a withered toghrak. “We believed we were nearing ‘land,’ ” Hedin admits, but from the next high dune nothing was visible in any direction but endless stages of yaman-kum. Three days had passed without water. “Men, as well as camels, are extremely weak,” he wrote in his journal: “God help us!” On 1 May, wild with thirst, he forced himself to drink the flammable spirit from his Primus stove; it burnt his throat “like oil of vitriol” and nearly killed him. This he presents as the act of one determined, heroically determined, to prevail, but the more I learned about Hedin, and the more I sensed his disregard for the lives of others, the more I wondered if it was not an act of self-destruction.
* * *
—
IN THE CAR on the way to the desert, Absalom looked anguished. I could hear the camel man barking, camel-like, from his mobile: if we were late, he was saying, he would not be there. Three o’clock, no later. It would mean driving through the heat of the day. It being Friday, it would also mean driving through the hours reserved for prayer. Absalom hung up, and wrung his hands. Actually wrung them, as if washing them under a tap. He removed his thick spectacles—their prescription severe enough that he was all but blind without them—placed them in his lap and wiped his face with both hands. He removed his spectacles case from his satchel and from it took a cloth and wiped each lens, then returned his spectacles to his face.
We were to meet the camel man at the edge of the desert thirty kilometres north of Hotan. From there we were to spend two days travelling into the desert before circling back south to the ruins of the stupa known as Rawak, a Buddhist reliquary and sanctuary built sometime around the fourth century, prior to the Islamic conquest of Hotan. Aurel Stein first visited Rawak in April 1901, six years before his second expedition and his famous discoveries at Dunhuang. Rawak, or “High Mansion,” which Stein’s guide had spoken of only as “an old house” half-buried in the sand, turned out to be “the most imposing structure [he] had seen among the extant ruins of the Hotan region.”
For two hours the driver hardly went faster than twenty; he used the quiet roads, the narrow roads lined with poplars, the farm roads between lines of date palms. There were things it was not possible to discuss, even inside the car, thirty kilometres from the city. Each time we passed a row of houses Absalom would press a finger to a
button and my window would be wound up. “I will tell you,” was all he said, by which he meant “later,” although he never would. He and the driver, his friend’s father, hardly exchanged a word, just glances. The driver slowed further until the sound of the tyres on grit was louder than the engine, and it was possible to hear the steering wheel squeaking in its column; until it seemed that our very slowness was showy. I was a carnival-float princess; a despot on his progress; a sugar baron. For fifteen kilometres we went on like this, at jogging pace, the windows sealed. Absalom and the driver stared at the road ahead even when villagers came to their doors and watched us pass. “We must go slowly,” he said finally, turning to me. “To keep you safe.”
We pulled up at a noodle shack and the owner came out and watched us. Absalom got out and shook hands with him. The driver stood by the bonnet. I was to stay where I was. Don’t open the windows. Absalom handed some notes to the noodle man, who went and spoke to another man who was standing at the darkened door of the shack. He in turn summoned two children, a girl and a boy of six or seven. Once they had been detailed, they skipped off into the maze of buildings and alleyways and fields behind the building.
I sat in the hot car. I had no idea what was happening. When I looked back, Absalom was standing there alone, passing a hand slowly though his hair, and holding it there, awfully, on top of his head as he gazed at the gravel. The road was not a small one but no other cars passed. The children had not returned. In a cage above the stall were two blue canaries and a lovebird. There was silence. It was a strange characteristic of the desert’s edge: even the cage-birds did not sing.
The Immeasurable World Page 15