The Immeasurable World

by William Atkins

  The dunes had none of the towering grandeur of their Gobi or Arabian counterparts—and yet it was possible, occasionally, to glimpse a distant vista and suddenly to gain a sense of the Taklamakan’s vastness. We would be riding in a basin ringed by dunes, and following a ridge to a dune-top we would see the selfsame dunes (so it seemed to me) rising and falling to the horizon. It was like finding yourself enclosed within mirrored walls, the same scene extended to infinity in every direction.

  It was inconceivable that life could exist here any more, and yet over the next ridge was a poplar tree three metres high and seemingly thriving. In the hollows between the dunes were raised plateaus of cracked clay, clay which had once formed part of the bed of a lake or river and which Hedin identifies as “the last surviving fragments of the bed of the great Central Asian Mediterranean.” Over thousands of years, being more solid than the surrounding sand, they had been exposed by the wind and now stood like crumbling plinths or podiums, as flat and square as the ruins of buildings, ringed by their own rubble and the dry reeds that grew wherever there was any moisture.

  The sun was cooled and dimmed by a gauze of dust. The wind was of such force—or rather so unrelenting—that all you wanted to do was to stop; stop, and find shelter, and yet it is in the nature of the buran—the notorious wind of the Taklamakan—that its direction shifts continually. The air was thick with dust, clogging the nose, the heavier grains skimming or tumbling across the dunes’ rippled surface and in turn disturbing further grains. Any shelter could be no more than momentary. Aurel Stein called the deserts of the Sahara and Arabia and southern Africa “tame”: tamed by their waterholes, however sparse, that enabled the existence of nomadic tribes. In the Taklamakan, as in the Black Gobi, there were no nomads: “the absence of moisture bans not only human existence but also practically all animal and plant life.”

  A Muslim legend of the sixteenth century tells of a Sufi preacher, Khoja Jamal ad-Din, who came to a town named Lob Katak, unknown today but situated somewhere in the Taklamakan. Refused water by the town’s citizens, he warned that Allah would visit a punishment upon them. With that, he left, accompanied by his sole acolyte, who was also the town’s muezzin. The muezzin decided to return to the town (why is unclear), and it was while he was delivering the call to prayer from a minaret that a sand storm blew up, a karaburan, or “black storm.” The air cleared to reveal a silent infinity of sand from which nothing extended—nothing but the top of the minaret, upon which stood the stunned muezzin, like the last survivor of a scuttled ship clinging to its crow’s nest.

  The lost settlements of the Taklamakan are not just mythical. Four months before reaching Rawak in the winter of 1900, Aurel Stein excavated the ruins of the Buddhist city of Dandan-uilik (“Ivory Houses”), which lies under the sand a ten-day trek north-east of Hotan. “Pregnant with death and solitude,” as he put it, the city had not been consumed, like Lob Katak, by some scriptural cataclysm, but fifteen hundred years before had simply been conceded to the desert due to the failure of a stream from the Kunlun Mountains.

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  SVEN HEDIN’S DESPAIR was short-lived. The next day a darkening of the horizon-line betrayed the existence, finally, of vegetation, living vegetation. His man Kasim being too weak to go further, Hedin on his own crawls towards the poplar forest that marks the valley of the River Hotan. “I do not think I at all exaggerate, if I say that during the first ten minutes I drank between five and six pints,” he writes, and there is euphoria in his description of his resurrection:

  Every blood-vessel and tissue of my body sucked up the life-giving liquid like a sponge…My blood, which had lately been so sluggish and so slow…now coursed easily through every blood-vessel. My hands, which had been dry, parched, and as hard as wood, swelled out again. My skin, which had been like parchment, turned moist and elastic.

  I’m reminded of W. J. McGee rubbing water into the skin of the dehydrated Pablo Valencia in the Sonoran Desert, fifteen years later, “the skin first shedding and then absorbing it greedily as a dry sponge.” The sheer thirst of organic matter. Removing his boots and filling them, Hedin returns to the dying Kasim: “Would you like some water?”

  His account of this expedition, more so than his subsequent triumphs, established his reputation for hardiness and a ruthlessness that was indistinguishable from sadism, a willingness to sacrifice lives—camels, livestock, men—to his ambition. Only one of the three men he abandoned survived. It was not until later in his life, however, that these characteristics came to be associated with his political stance. Remember his admiration of the “good-looking” tyrant General Ma. “By temperament Hedin was a Nazi,” wrote Sir Clarmont Skrine, the former British consul general of Kashgar (in an obituary), “to whom exploration was a Kampf, a struggle not only against the forces of nature but also on paper, against rival explorers. It is not surprising that he espoused in turn the causes of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler.” And indeed there is a photo of Hedin, a smirking old goat full of good wine, shaking the hand of the Führer. What did T. E. Lawrence write of the Bedouin? “His sterile experience robbed him of compassion and perverted his human kindness to the image of the waste.”

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  WHENEVER AUREL STEIN describes his arrival at a new destination it seems to be accompanied by a howling sand storm, and when he reached Rawak on 10 April 1901, “the season of burans had now fully set in, and the gales…were blowing daily.” His excavations would reveal a rectangular courtyard measuring forty by thirty-three metres, within which the remains of the stupa’s cylindrical tower rose nine metres above the sand’s surface. Built of mud bricks and dating from the peak of Xinjiang Buddhism in the fourth century, the structure was cruciform in plan, with staircases leading to the tower’s base at each of the four cardinal points. Even in photographs from ten years ago, you can make out the boundary wall and corner steps. The tower, its dome long collapsed, had once been a reliquary. Like the reclining figure at Dunhuang, its statuary and paintings had represented the Buddha’s nirvana. Surrounding the courtyard wall, buried in the sand, ninety-one man-sized stucco statues were uncovered by Stein and his workers. They had depicted the Buddha and bodhisattvas, some still bearing scraps of their original 1,500-year-old paint. “Those on the inside face of the wall could still be expected to be in a fair state of preservation,” writes Stein in Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan, “owing to the depth of the sand, which was in no place less than seven feet.” However, “the heavy stucco statues threatened to collapse when the protecting sand was being removed.” The threat was heightened by the buran, which “carried away the fine sand which had filled the interstices between the statues and the wall behind, and thus placed the friable masses of stucco in danger of sliding down through their own weight to immediate destruction.” It was this process, in Stein’s view, that explained why so many of the colossal statues were missing their heads; these had extended above the sand and therefore had been deprived of its preserving support. While he and his men did remove a cache of small relics for (where else?) the British Museum, he recognised that the statues themselves were too large and fragile to survive such a journey, and so, having described and photographed them, he went about their reinterment. “It was a melancholy duty to perform, strangely reminding me of a true burial.”

  When we reached the site and dismounted, the stupa that had so delighted Stein emerged from the dust as a drum of pale eroded bricks four metres tall. Only the top few centimetres of the courtyard wall were exposed. Nothing could be seen of the celebrated reliefs or frescoes. When Stein returned six years after his first visit he was told that a band of jade diggers had visited the site two years earlier in search of “treasure” and had stripped the wall of its stucco images. I spent half an hour walking around the site while Absalom sat in the shade of the storage shed amid a mass of plastic bottles. Strewing the sand were bricks fallen from the stupa; a stringy ta
marisk was growing from a corner of the tower’s stump. I stood and listened to the prickle of sand being blown against my trousers. A car’s horn sounded from a nearby track; our driver.

  A buran had descended on Hotan when we returned. The air was freighted with dust. In the oases, sand storms are rare—sand has a mass that means only the most powerful winds will lift it above head-height. It is dust, finer and lighter, that forms the clouds that hang over Hotan. As we crossed the Black Jade River once more and passed the empty jade market, the city had taken on the cold pallor of the desert. I thought of the grey fuzz of a disconnected TV. Visibility was reduced to a few hundred metres, and you could taste it, chalky on the lips, and feel it in your eyes like the onset of a stye. The tiled steps leading to the entrance of my hotel were covered in footprints, as if they had been forensically dusted. The leaves of the few trees were pale. The dust lacked fog’s coolness but seemed to sit on the city like a fog, with a fog’s power to dissimulate and deaden, so that your voice was deprived of its resonance, and with a fog’s miasmic strangeness. The whole land was mobile: the dunes inched windward year by year, smothering roads and railways, farms and cities. The stuff of the earth was swirling in the air. The only solidity was the oases, and even their permanence was illusory. For two days the dust grounded all flights. I was trapped in Hotan. “We’re used to it,” Absalom said, as we ate ice cream in the parlour overlooking the main square. That was not to say he didn’t hate it. The dust—it was possible to speak about the dust. The way it infiltrated your life and dictated your movements. It had grown worse even in his lifetime, he said. Moreover it was experienced by the citizenry as a deliberate plague, a collective insult, and more than just a quirk of nature. Remember the people of Lob Katak, entombed under a hundred metres of sand, with their livestock, their children. That—a mere act of God—would be tolerable. The cause of the dust (articulated in a whisper) was the “tests”—meaning the nuclear tests that had taken place at Lop Nor, five hundred kilometres north-east. The base, covering some 100,000 square kilometres, was established with Soviet assistance in 1959. China’s first bomb, codenamed 596, was exploded there in 1964. It has been claimed that cancer rates in Xinjiang are up to 35 per cent higher than in the rest of China. Contamination from the tests has been detected more than a thousand kilometres west in neighbouring Kazakhstan.

  I’d assumed the dust was a natural phenomenon exacerbated by desertification until I saw the official footage from the underground tests of the 1980s: the earth’s sudden heaving, then the instant transformation of static matter to swirling airborne matter, as, from the surface of the desert as far as the horizon, a dense blanket of dust was thrown up—as if a beater were being taken to the back of an old rug. I remembered the “black cloud” that had blinded Yami Lester at Emu Field. When I told Absalom I thought the tests had ended in the 1990s, his terseness was so uncharacteristic it took me aback—“You think they would tell us?”

  From my hotel window the white armoured personnel-carriers were everywhere and the sound of sirens constant. At the time, I knew nothing about the massacre that was said to have been committed in Luntai County on the other side of the desert. Initially the Chinese state news agency would report that “at least” two people were killed during riots. It was not until a week later, when I was in Shanghai, that it admitted that fifty people had died in gunfire and explosions, forty of them “terrorists.” What did forty terrorists look like? Did they look like rioters? Exiled Uighur-rights activists put the number of dead in the hundreds. I wondered if it was this incident, rather than the dust storm, that had caused my flight to be cancelled. Ilham Tohti, on trial in Urumqi, would be sentenced to life in prison for his “separatist” activities, and all his assets seized. According to Radio Free Asia, he is held today at “Xinjiang No. 1 Prison” in Urumqi, five thousand kilometres from his Beijing home—the “furthest frontier” among the Qing Dynasty’s zones of exile.

  Half a block from my hotel, the upper storeys of the city’s police headquarters were lost in the pall; only when the air cleared the next morning, as we drove to the airport, was its roof visible, bristling with antennae.

  4

  BASTARD STURGEON

  The Aralkum, Kazakhstan

  In the landlocked city of Orsk, in Russia’s far south, Commander Alexey Ivanovich Butakov commissioned the construction of a fifteen-metre schooner. At the end of April 1848, the Konstantin was transported seven hundred kilometres south into the Central Asian desert.

  Unlike Charles Sturt’s men hauling their whaleboat towards Australia’s centre four years earlier, Butakov knew his vessel would be used. The caravan’s destination, to which it was transported in pieces, was the Russian fort at Raim, sixty-five kilometres from the mouth of the Syr Darya on the Aral Sea’s north-eastern coast, in what is now Kazakhstan. Crossing steppe, crossing desert, the caravan comprised two hundred infantrymen, two companies of Cossacks, six hundred cavalrymen, 2,500 carts and 3,500 camels, forming a train extending beyond the horizon. In Raim it took a month to unpack the Konstantin’s thousands of components and rebuild her.

  Alexey Ivanovich Butakov: “the Magellan of the Aral Sea,” Alexander von Humboldt called him. The navigation and mapping of what was then the world’s fourth biggest inland body of water—at 67,000 square kilometres, smaller only than lakes Superior and Victoria and the nearby Caspian Sea—were his life’s work. The charts he produced were in use as late as the 1950s. In his appearance there’s not much to note—the uniform, the standard moustache. That he was exceptionally robust can be inferred from his deeds. As a young senior officer he’d spent two years aboard a military transport navigating the world.

  In a letter to Sir Roderick Murchison, who read it to the Royal Geographical Society, London, on 13 December 1852, Butakov described his expedition. Supporting the Konstantin, he explained, was a smaller schooner, the Nicolas, which had been transported to Raim the previous year. Under Butakov’s deputy, Pospeloff, her crew was charged with surveying and sounding the eastern coast, while Butakov in the Konstantin would cover the northern coast. On 20 July 1848 they cast off upon the Syr Darya. Six days later they reached the open waters of the uncharted Aral. The Konstantin’s crew numbered twenty-seven, among them two topographers, a surgeon and various non-commissioned officers, including Taras Shevchenko, poet, artist and exiled enemy of the state.

  The first voyage lasted two months. On 23 September the Konstantin anchored off the small island of Kos Aral at the mouth of the Syr Darya, waiting for the river to unfreeze. The crews spent a cold six months on the island in wooden huts. It was the winter of European revolutions, but for the captain “the only remarkable incident of my wintering there was a tiger-hunt in our near neighbourhood.” It was not until May that conditions improved sufficiently to allow the expedition to resume. “Our labours,” Butakov writes, “were crowned with the most complete success; notwithstanding manifold risks and difficulties, inseparable from an exploring expedition on waters so boisterous and so completely unknown.” As for the climate, “I shall only say that the summers are exceedingly hot and the winters very cold.” The coast was “a perfectly dead and barren desert,” and yet Butakov is able to list an abundance of wildlife: “immense quantities of pelicans, cormorants, sea-gulls and sea-swallows” and “a great many wild hogs.” The principal fish “are the sharp-nosed sturgeon and the Silurus, or bony pike.” On occasion, finding themselves far from shore, the crew were obliged to drink the waters in which they floated. The water was salt, said Butakov, but less so than the oceans, whose flavour after all he was familiar with: “Its taste resembles that of the Gulf of Finland, at about a hundred versts from Cronstadt.”

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  I ARRIVED IN the city of Almaty in eastern Kazakhstan as the World Weightlifting Championships were starting. Kazakhstan’s hope was Zulfiya Chinshanlo, who’d set a world record in the clean-and-jerk at the 2012 Olympics. The city was ful
l of nervous giants in white tracksuits, and at the public baths it was possible to feel diminished. There I met a man in his fifties whose duty it was to tend the saunas and steam rooms. His was one of the few jobs, it occurred to me, that require you to be nude from the moment you clock in. Nude apart from rubber sandals and a conical towelling hat. The Russian sauna, fiercest of them all, had in its wall a quarter-tonne iron door opened and closed by a bolt operated by a broom handle. He would open the door and a great blast of heat would be unleashed. Unfazed, balls swinging gladiatorially, he’d throw four ladles of water from a pail into the firebox and push the furnace door to. The heat became intolerable.

  I thought of him afterwards at the Cathedral of the Holy Ascension. It had been reconsecrated in the nineties having spent forty years as the national museum of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Flanking the door to the nave were murals: on the left the chorusing entrants to heaven; on the right, cartoons of the greater mass of us, naked and shrieking, flabbergasted to find themselves subjected to the innovations of hell’s furnace-tenders. A young novice was standing with her back to me, a vestal finger extended towards one of the icons that clad the narthex walls. She was a figure from an icon. There we stood for perhaps ten seconds, I with one hand still on the open door, she with an arm outstretched, seemingly abandoned to her devotions. But then she made a hook of her finger, and drew it slowly towards her. “Pauk,” she smiled, noticing me. Dangling on a thread from her fingertip was a spider—pauk—that had been hanging across the door. I went in and, among the headscarfed babushkas, lit a candle and placed it before Christ Pantocrator.