The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia

by Donald Rayfield

  The return was more dangerous than the approach. Their Tsaidam guide, having once lost his way, had been summarily dismissed. The Khampa, by tradition more bandit than herdsmen, were alerted; the expedition met them, the men all sporting sword scars, wearing only sheepskins over their naked bodies, and armed with sabres. Another Tibetan tribe, the Ngoloks, also inhabited the mountains between the Yangtse and the Huang Ho, driven there from Szechwan by the Tungan, living out of reach of—and outlawed by—the Chinese, cut off by a schism from the Dalai Lama. Snow set in after four clear days and the expedition had a struggle to get into the mountains. The Khampa sold them some sheep, but Khampa sheep, unlike those from Tsaidam, were unruly and would not follow the caravan. Two got away; two more were shot. The rain had at least died down and the streams were easier to ford, the grass was sprouting and there was plenty of meat.

  After an adventurous trek—Roborovsky had been knocked off his horse by a Khampa sheep in mid-river and nearly drowned—they were back on the ‘Starry Sea’. August brought autumn snow. Slithering over bog, managing a mere ten miles a day, the expedition made for Oring Nor (O-ling Hu), the second of the two lakes from which the Huang Ho flowed; they were looking forward to a profusion of waterbirds. There were one or two strange omens. Herds of wild yak kept crossing their path, moving east to west, evidently disturbed; a track ran along the stream, the Jagyn Gol, that led to the lake. Then, reconnoitring a path through the marshes and pools, Roborovsky saw a party of travellers; he took them to be a Tangut caravan.

  The following dawn the duty Cossack woke Kozlov to read the air temperature. Suddenly they heard horsemen bearing down on the camp from two sides. The Cossack fired; the others woke, seized their carbines and had taken aim by the time the horsemen were in range. It was too dark to shoot properly, but the Ngoloks (as they turned out) wheeled away, leaving two dead horses and one dead man. The Cossacks fancied they saw other bodies retrieved by the survivors, which was likely in view of the Khampa superstition that a corpse unburied would haunt the tribe. They examined the dead Ngolok, who had a sabre, a matchlock gun and fifty bullets. Then, when all was quiet and the interpreter from Hsi-ning had emerged from under a felt groundsheet, they surveyed the damage. One of Przhevalsky’s horses had been shot in the stomach and had to be despatched. Worse, eight of his Khampa horses, hearing the Ngoloks’ familiar cries and the pounding of hooves, had torn their tethers and fled with the attackers. This, after the death and abandonment of several camels, was a serious loss.

  The Ngoloks watched from the hills; the Russians cleaned their rifles and built a fire of dung. After breakfast Przhevalsky broke camp and moved on in battle order. Soon the Russian caravan was blocked by 300 armed horsemen. But Przhevalsky’s long-range carbines could outshoot any number of matchlocks, and behind the Ngoloks lay an unfordable river. The line of horsemen broke and they tried to slip by on either flank. Przhevalsky ordered his men to fire fourteen volleys and estimated that ten Ngoloks were killed or wounded. Then, victorious, he promoted every one of his men by one rank and renamed the Jagyn Gol in Russian, Reka razboynichya, ‘Robbers’ River’.

  He had only seven horses and twenty-four camels, some dying. Half his men now had to dismount and much of their food was jettisoned. For a day or two they explored the shore of Oring Nor; Roborovsky and Protopopov took photographs when rain permitted. The geese were breeding; Przhevalsky shot eighty-five and the expedition shared the bodies among themselves and the scavenging bears. Then the Ngoloks reappeared. Przhevalsky decided to provoke a daylight attack. He sent the Hsi-ning interpreter, Roborovsky and four Cossacks as if to parley with them; they were to show fear and to shoot only in self-defence. Three Ngoloks met them and rode away in contempt. The trick worked; two hours later a Ngolok party tried to rustle the camels and horses from the Cossack herdsmen. Behind them several hundred armed men appeared. Przhevalsky tied up his camels and, this time, hobbled his horses. Flat ground lay between the two sides; the lake cut off the Russians’ retreat. Half a mile away the Ngoloks broke into a charge, to be met with a salvo and rapid fire. Przhevalsky shot the leader’s horse from under him and the Ngoloks turned away to take cover behind nearby rocks.

  Przhevalsky left some men to hold his camp and took the rest to attack the Ngoloks. He killed several. The rest withdrew to a new position and, after the emboldened interpreter had brought up fresh ammunition and water, Przhevalsky sent a party under Kozlov to storm them. More Ngoloks attacked the base camp but were driven off. Soon dusk fell and the battle ended. The Russians had lost a horse; the Ngoloks had lost perhaps thirty men. They watched the expedition the next day but held off. Other Tibetans appeared, but these turned out to be the vanguard of a 500-yak Tangut caravan from Hsi-ning to the Do Chu, with 160 armed Tangut. Some were friends of the Hsi-ning interpreter and they warned the expedition not to follow the Huang Ho downstream, for it was too deep to ford, except with yaks. Przhevalsky saw he had no choice but to return to Tsaidam.

  As they left the ‘Starry Sea’, the black-necked cranes had laid a second clutch: Przhevalsky and Roborovsky caught twenty-four fledglings for their collection. In the mountains above the Huang Ho they rested a little. Przhevalsky’s diary for 27 July/8 August reads: ‘The north-westerly storms went on all night and brought, probably from Tsaidam, clouds of dust. It was very cold … we stopped to camp on the marsh grasses by Mt. Urundushi. From tonight our sentries will be taken off—only double watches will be kept. Today, for Teleshov’s nameday, we had a feast of cognac, caviar, jam and coffee.’

  They crossed the Burkhan Budda down to their base in Tsaidam. The Cossacks were grazing their camels here in safety. Przhevalsky rested with them before going on to the kherem at Dzun-dzasak; he dried out the plant specimens saturated with the. monsoon rain and snow, and lay and read the Cossacks’ books. The only native was a lama who hung around the camp for protection and titbits; he sold Przhevalsky a third guard dog, called Dyrma. Przhevalsky sent Dyrma off with the interpreter—the first Chinese Przhevalsky had learnt to respect—Dondok and three other Cossacks across Tsaidam to get new camels. He hunted and wrote while waiting for their return.

  Przhevalsky was pleased with his achievements. He had mapped the source of the Huang Ho; he had thirty fine bear skins from the sixty bears he and his men had killed; European moral primacy had been proved by killing a score or so Ngoloks. It was time for the second stage of the expedition, westwards to the Gas oasis and Lob Nor, along the foothills of the mountains walling off Tibet, through which he might still break south to Lhasa. After a little desultory plant-hunting, he moved a few miles east to the kherem of Barun-dzasak. Dondok met them with thirteen camels that he had ‘compulsorily purchased’.

  A few days later, on the Nomokhun Gol, fifty-four camels fell ill with a fever. There was nothing, the Mongols advised, to be done except wait three weeks, starve them, smoke them, and cool them with water; a caravan of 2,000 yaks was said to be stuck near Kuku Nor with the same disease. For eighteen days Przhevalsky shot pheasants and went on bear battues. A Tungan messenger arrived from Hsi-ning; General Ling had sent Przhevalsky his letters and newspapers. But it was autumn, the season for travelling, and he was impatient. He hired forty-five horses so that his convalescent camels could walk unladen. Cossacks took the horses ahead, while the men trudged slowly behind with the sick camels. The first snow of September turned to heavy rain, unprecedented in Tsaidam, and the salt-clay ground became a morass. Demoiselle cranes were flying overhead on a non-stop journey to southern Tibet.

  When the expedition had reached the Taijiner khoshun of western Tsaidam with its 500 gers, the camels had recovered. The Tungan from Hsi-ning got on so well with Przhevalsky that he agreed to stay on and help find sheep and guides, instead of following General Ling’s instructions and going to the Do Chu to investigate the Khampa and Ngolok attacks on the Russians. Another month of travelling across easy but inhospitable desert, littered with skeletons, brought them to Lake Gas. Lake Gas was a disappointment; despite t
he Mongols’ songs of praise, it was a ten-mile saline expanse of water, surrounded by marsh and reeds, supporting nothing but hares and wolves. Dondok, Abdul and the guide searched in vain for a human being. They found only traces of gold-diggers from Cherchen and hunters from Lob Nor, and no sign of the Russian old believers who were said to have found their way here twenty-four years before.

  Przhevalsky stopped at a warm sulphurous spring, where he found his gerbil, Brachiones przewalskii, a few bears and huge herds of kulan. He moved camp six miles west, where the kulan had not yet exhausted the grass and there was fuel and meat in abundance. Here his guide’s competence ran out; Przhevalsky had to find the route north-west to Lob Nor that he had heard of in 1876. Dondok, the Cossack Khlebnikov, and the Mongol took two weeks’ food and went north; Teleshov and another Cossack went west, only to turn back after three days with Teleshov badly gored by an orongo gazelle he had wounded. After twelve days Dondok’s party came back; trying one gorge after another they had found a pass over the Altyn Tag into the valley that had been the nearest point to Tibet that Przhevalsky had reached in 1877, and they had thus ‘closed the circle’ of his explorations, rediscovering a route unused by Europeans since Marco Polo. The Kun Lun mountain system had now been outlined, a double, sometimes treble, chain from China to Turkestan. Przhevalsky had winter at his disposal; he did not want to visit Lob Nor until the spring migration and, despite Ney Elias’s opinion, ‘even a Tibetan or a yak could hardly survive a winter in the Tibetan highlands’. He now intended to explore south and west in search of routes on to the north-western Tibetan plateau.

  Dondok, Abdul and six Cossacks were left in charge of the base at Gas. Przhevalsky took the rest of his men, with twenty-five camels, four horses, fifteen sheep and two months’ rations, westwards up the valley that divided the Tsaidam mountains in the south from the main ridge of the Altyn Tag in the north. They moved up slowly in the teeth of a freezing gale. Przhevalsky named the valley Dolina vetrov, the ‘Valley of Winds’. At 12,000 feet he could see the way westwards to a pass that led down to the oasis of Cherchen in Turkestan; he turned back fifty miles and broke through the mountains by a gorge that opened on to the Tibetan plateau. Barren, loess-covered rocks dominated the west and the east; he called them the Moscow and Columbus Mountains. He was now on a shingle plain, utterly desolate save for traces of secret gold workings and wormwood scrub that saved the camels from starvation. The horses staved off dehydration by licking the ice that covered the saline pools: they were too weak to go farther. Przhevalsky and Roborovsky explored a few more miles; they came to a lake some thirty miles long which they named Nezamerzayushcheye, ‘Icefree,’ then on to a solid wall of loess in monstrous shapes, 800 feet sheer. The Tsarevich’s telescope revealed only impasses and boundless snows on a ridge which Przhevalsky called Zagadochny, ‘Mysterious,’ and which the Imperial Geographical Society was to rename Przhevalsky’s Range.

  The cold was the worst they had experienced, the mercury froze, and the wind never let up. The air was thick with salt and loess dust. But Przhevalsky fought his way back to the pass leading to Cherchen, where he found the tracks of men and donkeys who had retreated there in the autumn. Satisfied, he led his men with the wind behind them down towards the Gas oasis. He had found a direct route from Turkestan to Tsaidam over easy gradients and, in autumn at least, practicable for yaks, camels or horses, shorter and better watered than any other route to Tsaidam, or Tibet, from Russian territory.

  The Russian New Year of 1885 (13 January) was celebrated by shooting twenty-three orongo. The Cossacks took the meat and the camels straight down to base, while Przhevalsky climbed the Tsaidam ridge and broke through to the south, to the north slopes of the Columbus Mountains, into a corridor that was part of the old route from Lob Nor to Tibet, perhaps untouched since the late 1870s when 100 Turghud Mongols went to Lhasa and seven died of the rigours of the journey. Lack of food made extensive exploration impossible; Przhevalsky had to retrace his steps, living on boiled orongo meat, irritated by the nocturnal screams of his unhappy camels.

  The camels recovered at Gas, but the horses had to be abandoned. After a haircut and the first wash for many weeks, the expedition was ready for the journey to Lob Nor. It was an easy pass across the ‘Nameless Ridge’, the first part of the Altyn Tag; they broke up ice to take through the waterless valley and second ridge that followed. Shovelling the loose earth from the limestone and marble rock, they led the camels over the main part of the Altyn Tag—the Mountains of Gold—and discovered to their astonishment the tracks of a cart, presumably the two-wheeler capable of being dismantled, that carried important lamas to and from Tibet. A descent of 3,000 feet brought them to a spring where they stopped for grazing. Then they came down to Przhevalsky’s camp of eight years ago, situated at 6,000 feet. The coals of his camp fire and the hollows where his camels had bedded down were undisturbed by the passage of time. It was early February, but the first heralds of spring—ducks and swans—were already making for Lob Nor. Dondok and Abdul followed them to reassure the ruler of Lob Nor, Kunchikan Bek, and his timid people. They returned to camp with gifts of fresh bread, and the expedition moved down to the marshes.

  Lob Nor had hardly altered. It was shallower and there were fewer fish. The primitive reed-dwellers had, in some cases, been ‘civilized’ by exiles from Khotan. Kunchikan Bek still ruled seventy families, but he was now answerable to the Bey of Turfan and, ultimately to the dowager Wang of Hami, to whom he paid an annual tax of nine otter skins. Przhevalsky felt at home; he liked the gentle patriarchal dominion of Kunchikan Bek and his nonagenarian advisers. He observed their customs with an open-mindedness and sympathy unusual in his travels. Abdul’s Uighur Turkic was understood in Lob Nor and communication was easy. Kunchikan, perhaps to his eventual ruin, made no secret of his liking for the Russians and dislike of the Chinese; he told Przhevalsky that he took poison each time he was summoned to Turfan and thus excused himself on grounds of sickness.

  So sympathetic was Kunchikan Bek that he tried to forward Przhevalsky’s letters via Kurla. The letters were returned, together with a threat from the Bey of Kurla:

  Stop these arrangements. You have sent a parcel from the Russians to be sent to Kulja. I am sending this packet back to you. You have found a new boss. Our authorities are the Chinese and Kulja is ruled by them. As our authorities are the Chinese you are not to listen to the Russians. Twenty Russians have arrived, let it be two thousand, it doesn’t matter to us. How dare you serve them of your own free will, knowing Russian plans? When you get this letter come to see me and ride non-stop and get here within seventy-two hours. Nasir Bek.

  Kunchikan Bek wisely sent a messenger instead, with Przhevalsky’s letters. They, but not the messenger, returned with a note from the Chinese saying that the treaty ‘does not oblige us to carry Russian mail from Lob Nor’. The Chinese were particularly sensitive about Russian activity in Sinkiang (Turkestan and Dzungaria), especially since the Russians had secured a foothold there with a consulate at Kashgar. They began a more or less overt surveillance of the expedition.

  Przhevalsky spent fifty days by Lob Nor. Kunchikan Bek’s wife baked bread for the men and the camels were allowed to graze the foothills of the Altyn Tag. Przhevalsky watched weddings and funerals; Roborovsky was permitted to photograph the people. They were even given a pair of maral horns from an imam’s grave. Early morning was spent on anthropological field work; hunting started at nine, dinner was at four and bed at eight in the evening. After the contretemps with the letters, life ran smoothly.

  In March a Chinese official arrived from Keria to examine Przhevalsky’s passport and tried in vain to persuade him to go straight home via Kurla and the Ili Valley. The bird migration was nearly over. In February Przhevalsky had killed 743 duck from his hide; the Tarim River had thawed and the surviving duck were leaving for safer waters. Przhevalsky was waiting for the dust to clear so that he could take exact bearings; each day the sun rose as a cloudy disc in the salt-satura
ted air. The nearby mountains were usually invisible; there was no rain, no dew, not even mist to settle the dust. At least the plants from the Do Chu and Huang Ho dried out well; at Lob Nor even corpses did not rot, but just became desiccated.

  On 20 March/1 April 1885 the third stage of the expedition began. Przhevalsky left for a tour of the chain of oases strung between the Altyn Tag and the Takla Makan. From the miserable outpost of Charkhalyk the track led into sand-dunes up to sixty feet high—the Takla Makan, already the biggest sand desert of Central Asia, was spreading over the thin fertile strip by the mountains. The expedition reached the Cherchen River. Nothing but a few poplars grew. It was hot and the river banks were swarming with scorpions and mosquitoes.

  Messengers came from Cherchen to lead Przhevalsky to a camp about half a mile out of town. The Cherchen of ancient history had been levelled by Genghis Khan; this was an eighteenth-century town, peopled by about 3,000 Machins, reputedly the original Indo-European stock of Turkestan, but Turkic-speaking like most Turkestanis. Yakub Bey’s fort lay in ruins; the town was a cluster of farmhouses set in orchards of mulberries and apples, overcrowded and, since the Chinese had recaptured it, oppressed. The hakim (town prefect) and aksakal (commercial consul; literally, whitebeard) told Przhevalsky that the Chinese had forbidden them on pain of death to sell him food or give him guides. Przhevalsky threatened to kidnap the hakim, who backed down at once. But the guides ran away and the expedition had to fall back on two others, one of whom was an Afghan.