The Immeasurable World

by William Atkins

  The children reappeared hand in hand and the boy passed something to the man, who pressed it into Absalom’s hand. It was like a drug deal. The children’s faces and clothes were filthy; both had shaven heads, girl and boy.

  Only when he sat down in the car did Absalom turn to me and open his fist briefly to show off the two objects the children had brought: translucent plastic lighters, one red, one yellow. He thumbed the red one and the flame flared. He smiled. “To be honest, it’s very hard to buy lighters here.”

  There had been an escalation in violence between the Han Chinese authorities and Uighurs in Xinjiang since riots in Urumqi in 2009 had left two hundred dead, mostly Han civilians, according to the official account. Thirty-one people had been killed last May (2014) when a car was driven through a Han market in Urumqi and explosives thrown. Three months ago the pro-government imam of China’s largest mosque, in the far western city of Kashgar, five hundred kilometres north-west of Hotan, was stabbed to death. Ninety-six died in the violence that followed in nearby Yarkand—though who had died and the nature of the violence was, as usual, unclear. Even knives were difficult to obtain these days, Absalom said, and matches and lighters could be bought legally only with a certificate of permission or from certain sanctioned individuals. Vouched-for men. It had been like this since the mass killings in Yarkand. To possess the belts of firecrackers I’d seen in Jiayuguan would mean arrest, and a vehicle entering a petrol station must first drop off any passengers at the entrance. For rural Uighurs the creation of fire had therefore become a daily trial. But we would need fire in the desert. The driver started the engine and eased onto the road.

  The sand was loud on the side windows, drowning out the radio’s Arabic pop. The whole substance of the land was in motion—not a constructive force but one of obliteration. A veneer of sand was blasting low across the straight road ahead. Out of the back windscreen the road we had passed over was already hard to distinguish from the flanking dunes. The desert was closing behind us. If the road were to be covered, only the occasional signpost or fencepost would indicate the proper course.

  We passed a walled farmstead then plantations of cotton and dates. The roadside ditches were brimming with stagnant pumpwater. Left alone, these hectares would revert to sandy scrublands of saxaul or tamarisk. At each corner of each field, visible through the dust was a scaffolding watchtower from which during the harvest an overseer would monitor lines of labourers. The military farm has been a tool of Chinese border statecraft since the Han dynasty. Between 1952 and 1954 some 150,000 Kuomintang soldiers, demobilised following their defeat by the Communist Party of China in the civil war, were deployed to Xinjiang to form the Production-Construction Military Corps, the Shengchan-sanshe bingtuan, know colloquially as the bingtuan. The bingtuan’s tasks were resettlement and land reform, to turn the languishing desert to use. During the Cultural Revolution the bingtuan absorbed hundreds of thousands of Han migrants. Today its ranks are believed to number between two and three million, a seventh of Xinjiang’s population. Under its aegis, the Qing’s treatment of the New Dominions as a zone of penal expulsion was revived. Prison farms were established across the region. Between 1949 and 1961 the cultivated area in Xinjiang expanded from 1.2 million hectares to 3.2. million. The bingtuan owns a third of Xinjiang’s arable land and controls paramilitary units whose efficiency in the suppression of unrest is proverbial. Absalom would hazard one detail about the bingtuan: “It produces a third of the world’s tomato paste.”

  As we were passing these fields I noticed two black BMWs a hundred metres ahead, facing the same direction as us but idling side by side, blocking the road, as if the left-hand car had flagged down the other. Our driver slowed and looked across at Absalom. The left-hand car carried no number-plate. The car directly in front of us sped off; but the other one stayed where it was, on the wrong side of the road. As we approached, it too started moving, keeping on the wrong side of the road, until it was going at the same speed as us, its front wheels level with our fender. Our driver did not accelerate. The other vehicle only dropped back when two motorcycles, farmers, approached on its side of the road. Finally it turned off into a farm compound, but I wondered about the other car. After a kilometre or so, I said, “Absalom?”

  He didn’t turn but nodded.

  “Okay?” I said and he nodded again.

  * * *

  —

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER we stopped at a squat castellated tower where we were to meet the camel man. It was newly built of black stone. Was it a bingtuan watchtower? A confection for tourists—not that there were any, apart from me—to survey the desert? Absalom didn’t know. It had been built about three years ago, the driver thought. The cement between the stones was white, like the grouting between bathroom tiles. The foundations having been exposed by the wind, the tower stood on a mound of coarse cement rising from the sand. People had been here: the ground was heaped with plastic bottles. “Nobody cares, you see!” Absalom was sweating, still wearing his pullover despite the heat; edgy. He looked at the driver then said to me, gesturing to the tower, “Go.” The driver looked at him. I climbed the steps and they followed.

  From the battlements we looked out at the shrub-covered sandy plain. The beginning of the desert. No livestock, no buildings or fences, only the low dunes and the empty road, and now just a sigh of wind. We climbed down and waited in the tower’s shadow. A fly settled on my wristwatch. Absalom took his phone from his pocket and poked its shattered screen, bringing up a photo of a government poster showing two men’s faces. The first man had a thick black beard of the prohibited kind, the second a goatee—sanctioned. I recognised the first man. “Isn’t that—?” I said. Yes, said Absalom, it was Keanu Reeves, the Hollywood actor, his image used by the designer solely because of the exemplary impropriety of his facial hair. “Abu Keanu!” Absalom whispered.

  He tapped the screen again. “Listen.”

  There was no sound. He turned it off, powered it up. “Listen.”

  Only the buzz of flies.

  The driver had walked off into the dunes, and when I went for a piss I found him lying buried in sand, only his head exposed. His eyes were shut, then they opened, and he smiled. Therapeutic.

  “Listen,” Absalom said again, when I returned. This time there was music, surprisingly loud. It was “The Lonely Goatherd.”

  “The Sound of Music!” he said, and he played it to the end, smiling and nodding.

  An hour later, around 4 p.m., hearing a distant engine, we climbed the tower again: a kilometre away a motorcycle was crawling towards us between the dunes, four Bactrian camels leashed behind it in a line.

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE NOT the lithe “yellow” Sorans of Arabia or even the coddled seaside donkeys of Jiayuguan—these stared at you balefully and squealed in outrage each time they were mounted. Their fur was like a bear’s after a long hibernation, pale and oily, each hump tousled with a whip of black hair. They were spotted with sores where the wooden saddle frame, or rope, or chain, had chafed away the fur and bitten into the skin beneath. Disobedience was punished with a cane slammed across the face, which brought another plaintive cry. But this treatment was reserved only for the junior animals, as a child might be spanked, and the older ones were treated with tender reverence—spoken to sweetly, prompted to sit by a leash swung gently against the haunches.

  After we had ridden for two hours the camel man dropped from his saddle and delved among the branches of a tamarisk. These dunes, for all their mobility, were as familiar to him as those of Ramlat Mitan in the Empty Quarter had been to Hassan. Older tamarisks and saxaul are often found growing from the summit of a low cone of sand—known as a nebkha—accumulated around the plant’s tap root. Islets rising out of the sand sea, these mounds are home to scorpions, lizards, flightless sand-jays. The lower branches will be clogged with windblown sand, and the slope of the mound s
cattered with dead twigs. From the heart of this specimen he extracted something—a blackened gridiron, which he knocked with his palm to shed the sand and hooked over the steel horn of his saddle. He had stowed it there who knew how long ago.

  The camel man’s name was Mr. Abdul Rasheed Mohammed; he wore grey flannel trousers, black flat-soled plastic shoes and a white shirt with cufflink holes. He wore a white sunhat pulled down low on his brow and, once the sun had set, a white dopa, the skullcap worn by some Uighur men. When answering a question he looked at the ground, but when addressing a camel he went close, placed a hand on its muzzle, and gazed into its wet eye. He had once crossed the Taklamakan from west to east, one and a half thousand kilometres. What was it like? He gestured to the surrounding dunes. Like this.

  The sand was grey, cool even on the surface, not at all like the vivacious “red country” of Arabia. Formed chiefly from quartz and feldspar, the Taklamakan contains little iron. From afar, even in late-afternoon sunlight, the dunes were the pale dishclout tone of an autumn sea. A soft disc of molten white, the sun vanished without flourish, and did not sink behind the line of dunes so much as melt before it reached them.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER WE HAD EATEN, I scooped out a bed, as Hassan had taught me in Oman—working from head to toe, pushing the sand outwards from a central line. In the museum in Hotan, I remembered, the prize exhibit was a mummy disinterred from a desert cemetery; such is the dryness of the desert that your body will scarcely decay: merely shrivel as all moisture is drawn from it. This process may commence before death. The mummy’s jaw was bound, but between his lips a grey catlike tongue extruded. His nostrils were like knife-jabs in his papery face. His hair was wiry black. He was about two thousand years old. And what was most touching, each night the vitrine in which he lay was covered in a velvet blanket, which each morning was rolled back and folded neatly at the foot of the vitrine.

  On the eastern horizon the sun’s soft afterburn disintegrated; but then, an hour or so later, the sky where it had set suddenly lightened once more, as if—impossibly—the moon was rising where the sun had set, or the sun was backing up. When I propped myself on my elbows and looked back at the camp, I saw that Absalom was awake too, sitting cross-legged in his blankets, looking out at the same area of light. He said he suffered from amnesia. He corrected himself—insomnia! Insomnia. He had not consulted a doctor. There was no point. “It is because of the pressures in my life.”

  “All the same,” I said.

  “A doctor cannot help.”

  This accounted for his harried look, the expression he wore of one who has just been jolted from deep sleep and whose facial muscles have yet to activate. It could sometimes look like disdain, his tiredness; and sometimes, I think, disdain was what it was—for someone who would come here willingly, who would spend money, perhaps six months’ wages for him (not much less for me), to not only abandon a land of greenery and freedoms but to forgo the opportunity to visit those desirable places—New York, Berlin, Paris—that were forbidden to him, and instead come here to dusty Xinjiang. Some of his friends had been able to go to Shanghai to study. Others had married. “But I’m different.” It wasn’t just poverty; he was a son of divorced parents, a taint attached. His mother remarried—“for money.” As for his father, “He sees me occasionally,” and then, to clarify, “Abandoned.”

  He said it “abandon-ed”; and when he said it—“abandon-ed”—it was easy to comprehend a feeling of forsakenness, desertion, that was about more than his father. Often, and without pride, he repeated that self-characterisation he’d come to accept: “I’m different.”

  The dim yellow glow on the horizon remained for five minutes before fading quickly to darkness. It was only later that I came upon Mildred Cable’s description in The Gobi Desert of “dancing magnetic light, which bewilders the inexperienced with its suggestion of men and camps in a region which is wholly deserted. The light flickers on the horizon, appearing and disappearing suddenly and unaccountably.” I got into my sleeping bag in its sand trench and listened to the camels slowly munching at the tamarisk. Their slow, scuffling dance. If your camel looks slowly left to right, it is a fox. If your camel stops chewing and stares into the darkness, something is wrong.

  Mr. Abdul Rasheed Mohammed had begun snoring as soon as he lay down. Silently Absalom was watching a movie on his iPad—it would be something American and dreadful: his face was aglow with it. Hour by hour the stars inched across the sky, and I did not sleep. The sand preserved none of the day’s warmth. Soon after midnight the quiet was broken by a low mechanical hum, and this was joined by another, as of two flying insects, and I sat up, with a start. The light, the yellow light on the horizon, had returned, and was growing stronger as the volume of the noise grew. Not Cable’s “dancing magnetic light” or an illusion. Absalom had put his iPad back in its box. “Motorcycles,” he said; and when I asked him where they were coming from and where they were going, he said, “Passengers”—by which I supposed he meant travellers, or smugglers (why else travel at night?)—and added, more mysteriously, that their destination was “Shangri-La,” a word he used without irony. Later I remembered that the fictional Shangri-La of the 1933 novel lay in the Kunlun Mountains that towered over Hotan. All night, every hour or so, I heard these or other “passengers” on their motorcycles and saw the shuddering lambency projected by their headlights low in the sky, like a lighthouse beam from far out at sea; but however often I heard them, and however close they seemed to come, not once were their lights directly visible, only their influence on the sky.

  Towards morning the crescent moon became visible above the horizon. As the sky lightened, the wind picked up. Within an hour it was too cold to sleep, though it was barely five. I got up and went to a thicket of dead tamarisk and tugged branches and roots from the sand and built a fire that roared in the wind but gave off hardly any heat.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN SVEN HEDIN’S mobility returned after his self-poisoning, he crawled through the sand following the caravan’s tracks and came upon his men encamped, too weak themselves to go further. “Who would be the unhappy wretch that should die last—whose lungs would be filled with the pestilential stench from the corpses of his comrades.” The cockerel they had brought with them was finally killed and its blood drunk. His retinue tried to slake their thirst with camel’s piss flavoured with vinegar and sugar but were soon doubled up with nausea. “Mohammed Shah was perfectly delirious, laughing to himself, weeping, babbling, playing with the sand.” A sheep they had brought with them was slaughtered, but Hedin, unlike his men, could not bring himself to drink its coagulating blood, he who had drunk the fluid from his stove. “Gaunt and wild-eyed, with the stamp of insanity upon him, Yolchi sat beside the tent, gnawing at the dripping sheep’s lungs. His hands were bloody; his face was bloody; he was a horrible sight to look upon.” Finally, leaving Yolchi and Mohammed Shah to die (“Water, sir!” Yolchi pleaded. “Only a drop of water!”), Hedin and the two remaining members of the party, Islam Bey and Kasim, made a final desperate eastward foray in search of water. Islam Bey by now was retching so violently, Hedin “thought he would bring up his very intestines.” And yet, if we are to believe his account, Hedin himself began to rally: “I was buoyed up by an abounding energy and the joy of life. I would not die in the desert. I was too young.” Finally he and Kasim abandon Islam Bey and the remaining camels with the ruins of their caravan and march east in search of the River Hotan. It was the following day when they came across the first remnants of blackened tamarisk and reeds extending from the sand, and finally, on 5 May: footprints! They follow the trail to the top of a dune; Kasim drops to his knees. Somehow they have walked in a circle. “They are our own footsteps!” To follow your own footprints endlessly—the classic desert ending.

  * * *

  —

  I TOOK THREE EGGS from a plastic bag—miracul
ously they had survived our journey intact—and placed them in the fire’s embers and heaped the embers around them. Absalom and Mr. Abdul Rasheed Mohammed were still sleeping. The camels began to stir. When I had asked their names Mr. Abdul Rasheed Mohammed had shaken his head: only numbers, and these were branded deep in the rump of each one. The senior animal was munching slowly on the saxaul to which it was tethered. Proper light was coming, not seeping from the east but (such was the haziness) infiltrating the whole sky at once, evenly, so that no region of it seemed brighter than any other. Low on the horizon, a pale centre evolved, and became a sun—the same extinguished, moonlike sun that had set the night before. A lone raven circled once, low, battling the wind, before vanishing over the brink of a dune.

  The wind was noisy in the dead tamarisk and in the fire’s flames. I took my scarf from my pocket and wrapped it once, twice around my head, so that only my eyes were exposed, and pulled my hat low on my head to keep the scarf in place. As the eggs hissed, the wind picked up, Absalom pulled himself from his pile of blankets and came and crouched beside me wordlessly, a blanket still cawled over his head. There was a crack, loud as a pistol-shot in the dull silence. One of the eggs had burst. A shout of shocked laughter and the blanket slipped from Absalom’s head. The noise had woken Mr. Abdul Rasheed Mohammed; he was sitting up in his nest of blankets staring at us as if concussed. He spilled water on his hands and there was the familiar mutter of prayer. Absalom didn’t join him.

  We mounted the camels. It would take us three hours to reach Rawak. As we left the camp I saw the twin dents in the sand where Mr. Abdul Rasheed Mohammed had knelt to pray. He sat on the lead animal, not astride it but side-saddle, as if on a bench, his short legs crossed at the ankle as he led us into the wind. If you opened your mouth it filled with dust. After a kilometre or two, he slipped off his camel, removed the gridiron from its hook on his saddle and lodged it back in the heart of a tamarisk. I couldn’t tell if it was the same specimen he’d taken it from the day before.