Journeys on the Silk Road Read online

  With his ice supply dwindling, he was pleased to see the droppings of hares and deer since this signaled water was near. That meant there would be fuel for a fire and grazing for the hungry camels, who by then had been ten days without food. The joy of the party was palpable when at last they encountered a glittering frozen lake. The ice was a foot thick but so clear Stein could see fish swimming below. “How sorry I am for having withstood the temptation of bringing skates with me!” Stein wrote. Hedin too had been tempted by a similar sight. The Swede had improvised a pair of skates from a couple of knives and amazed the Lop men as he’d taken a spin around the ice. A frozen lake was a familiar sight to Stein, having grown up in Hungary, but for Naik Ram Singh, from steamy Punjab, it was almost beyond comprehension. Nothing impressed the carpenter more. He was so astounded by the frozen lake he did not think the people from his village would believe him if he were to describe it to them.

  Other events of nature did impress Stein. On a rare rest day beside the frozen Tarim River, he was working at his table within his tent mid-morning when the sky suddenly darkened. At first he thought the yellow-brown cast to the sky forewarned a sandstorm was approaching. Yet the air was still and eerily silent. This was no sandstorm. Rather it was a total solar eclipse, and Stein was captivated by the play of light. Intense blues, yellows, and greens flitted across the landscape of riverine scrub, frozen river, and distant dunes. The silver corona was like a halo around the darkened sun. As the sunlight slowly returned so too did the sound of birdsong. Yet Stein was alone in his wonderment; his men seemed unmoved as they huddled around their fires.

  So far, Stein had stuck to the plan he mapped out in India: Kashgar, mountains, and Loulan. Now he made a diversion. He wanted to see where Tokhta Akhun had found the scrap of paper with Tibetan writing. In late January Stein rode in darkness toward the light of a campfire near Miran. There he had arranged to meet a party of hired laborers from Abdal to help with fresh excavations. With them was Chiang. Stein had sorely missed his companion since their parting six weeks earlier. It was a joyful reunion and the pair sat talking beside the campfire until late into the night.

  The logistics were easier at Miran than Loulan. A nearby stream provided plenty of ice for drinking and cooking, plus there was grazing for the camels amid roots and the dead foliage of toghrak trees, or wild poplars—curious trees whose leaves vary in shape from branch to branch. The solitary Stein always slept under canvas and pitched his tent away from his men. It meant he was at times even colder in his tent than his men were around their fires, so cold his moustache would freeze as he slept. (In contrast, Hedin camped out with his men, where he benefitted from an ingenious local method of keeping warm. Hedin’s men dug a hole, filled it with glowing coals which they covered with sand, then slept soundly on top of their heated bed.)

  During eighteen days at Miran, Stein made remarkable discoveries. Already his latest expedition was overshadowing the finds of his first as thoroughly as the moon had eclipsed the mid-winter sun. At Miran, he worked in almost unbearable conditions—and not merely because the daytime temperature dropped at times to minus five degrees Fahrenheit. In a ruined fort, he uncovered thousands of Tibetan documents. But they were buried in the most putrid ancient rubbish heaps Stein ever encountered—far worse than at Loulan. The stench in the Tibetan soldiers’ quarters suggested they had been used for functions other than sleeping. There were “sweepings from the hearth, litter of straw, remnants of old clothing and implements, and leavings of a yet more unsavoury kind.” In places the filth was nearly nine feet deep. Stein may have longed for helpers more interested in the work than the fleshpots, but few men anywhere have the dedication to tramp across a frozen wasteland for the privilege of digging in a filthy windswept midden.

  Miran had been a vital garrison for the Tibetans in the eighth and ninth centuries, Stein concluded. It lay at the intersection of two routes across Tibet to the southern oases of the Silk Road. But when Tibetan power waned, Miran sank into insignificance and into the sand. He had a reminder of the ancient trade one evening when a caravan of about seventy camels laden with brick tea from Dunhuang passed his lonely camp. They were Kashgar traders who had seen no one else for twenty-three days. They were eager to find food and water and could not stop for more than a hasty greeting before they passed into the night and the echo of their camels’ tinkling bells faded. Stein thought often of his patron saint Xuanzang who had probably passed Miran’s ruined walls when he crossed the Lop Desert. “I sometimes wondered behind which of the Stupa mounds he might have sought shelter during a brief rest. In a region where all is dead and waste, spiritual emanations from those who have passed by long centuries ago seem to cling much longer to the few conspicuous landmarks than in parts where life is still bustling,” Stein wrote.

  Stein wasn’t sure which was worse: watching over the digging from the fort’s ramparts and being sandblasted by the icy wind, or descending into the dig where clouds of stinking dust covered him—and everyone else—and froze in his moustache. He risked frostbite each time he removed his gloves to inspect a document. Conditions were so atrocious his men could not work for more than half an hour at a stretch. After days in bitter winds, digging and inhaling putrid muck, many became ill. Only Chiang remained healthy. The surveyor Ram Singh was so immobilized with rheumatism that Stein sent him back to Abdal. It was clear the surveyor’s health was failing, and he would have to be replaced. His handyman, Naik Ram Singh, suffered from fevers. Even Ramzan, Stein’s troublesome but hardy cook, developed a skin disease and hibernated under his furs for the rest of the time at Miran. Meanwhile, his substitute cook showed not “the slightest capacity for turning out tolerably digestible food.”

  Conditions were hellish but the finds were divine. They were utterly unexpected and yet strangely familiar, and none more so than in a ruined Buddhist temple complex where about four feet above the floor Stein uncovered delicately painted images of winged angels. With their aquiline noses, pink cheeks, dimpled lips, and feathered wings, these were Western-looking cherubs. “What had these graceful heads, recalling cherished scenes of Christian imagery, to do here on the walls of what beyond all doubt was a Buddhist sanctuary?” he wondered.

  The answer was that long before Miran became a garrison town and the Tibetans arrived, it had been a cosmopolitan oasis. In its third- and fourth-century heyday, distant merchants and monks were drawn to the bustling trading place and Buddhist center along the Silk Road’s southern route.

  Other strange sights emerged from the debris—secular images of young men and women that would not have been out of place in ancient Rome. He could hardly believe his eyes. “In one chapel the cycle of feasting youths & girls looks as if meant originally for the dado of some Roman villa,” he wrote. “In the other shrine I lighted to my surprise on a dado formed by exquisitely painted angels, better I should think than most of the early Christian art in the Catacombs.”

  The paintings used light and shade, or chiaroscuro, a technique well known in classical painting. But it had never before been seen in the early pictorial work of India or Central Asia. Stein wondered how such images and techniques had ended up in a Buddhist shrine on the edge of the Lop Desert. “I had longed for finds raising new problems, and here, indeed, I have got them. I know of no pictorial work in India or Central Asia which is so Western as this, on the very confines of the Seres [China].”

  In the temple complex he also found colossal Buddha heads and the remains of seated Buddhas. And he found wall paintings reflecting Buddhist legends. One in particular intrigued him. It depicted a well-known legend in which a prince gives away a magical rain-making white elephant. The image showed the mustachioed prince, richly dressed in Indian clothes and jewels, leading the elephant by the trunk. Behind the elephant was a procession that included four horses wearing the saddlery of ancient Rome. A clue to this mystery was suggested in writing on the elephant’s hind leg. The words told how much
the artist had been paid for his work and, most importantly, gave his name: Tita, which Stein recognized as a variation of Titus. It was the most Roman of names. Stein concluded that in the first few centuries after the death of Christ, a Roman subject skilled in its artistic traditions had somehow made his way east to a remote Buddhist center on the edge of China. For Stein, fascinated by the ancient links between East and West, the images were spellbinding.

  For my eyes, which had so long beheld nothing but dreary wastes with traces of a dead past or the wretched settlements of the living, the sight of these paintings was more than an archaeological treat. I greeted it like a cheering assurance that there really was still a region where fair sights and enjoyments could be found undisturbed by icy gales and the cares and discomforts of desert labours.

  Stein had little time to stand in wonder. He was determined to take away what he could and send it to Europe. The first hurdle was how to get the fragile murals safely out of the temples. Some had slipped from their original place and were leaning against the walls. The fragments, several feet wide and half an inch thick, were liable to crumble if touched.

  He had to improvise a way to remove and pack the murals without destroying them in the process. And he had to do so using materials at hand. His men dragged trunks of dead poplars to camp, where they were sawn into boards and cases. Stein knew Naik Ram Singh could produce packing cases with his few tools and some precious iron nails and screws brought from India. Although he was still battling fevers, the carpenter helped devise a way to salvage the fallen wall paintings. He slipped tin, improvised from empty cases, behind the artwork and padded the front with cotton wool and tough paper from Khotan. The winged angels and other attached murals were sawn from the walls and placed on padded boards before being packed into made-to-measure wooden cases. Some of the filled cases weighed nearly 200 pounds each. Others, including Titus’s elephant frieze, were too fragile or time-consuming to remove. Stein hoped to return to Miran after Dunhuang.

  At the foot of a fallen mural he found the remains of a pigeon and its nest, apparently killed when the wall that held its nest had collapsed. The bird had landed just under a Buddha whose hand was raised in a gesture of protection. The irony was not lost on Stein. Perhaps he hoped divine protection would not be too late for the wall paintings. They had thousands of miles to travel and faced months of buffeting by camels, yaks, ponies, and men. The odds of them arriving safely seemed slender, but he had provided every protection he could muster. To protect those he could not remove, he ordered that they be reburied, as he had done at Rawak Stupa in 1901.

  He could not remain at Miran much longer. Not if he wanted to cross to Dunhuang before the spring heat and sandstorms arrived. With the vivid murals re-entombed, Stein’s thoughts turned to the bleak landscape around him. “Truly this part of the country is dying & its conditions a foretaste of what ‘desiccation’ will make of our little globe—if things run long enough that way,” he wrote. As he returned to his Abdal depot, he noted how the Tarim River was dying. The arid desert was previously home to a rich, diverse civilization. What had happened? Why had oasis after oasis been abandoned? Lack of water might be the most obvious reason. Stein had seen evidence of this across the southern Tarim Basin. Mountain-fed rivers no longer reached the once-thriving settlements, now silent ruins. Yet natural causes—shrinking water supply and changing water courses—alone did not account for their abandonment, he suspected. Human factors may have played their part. Cultivation in these oases relied on complex and carefully tended irrigation and that needed a substantial workforce. When that was disrupted—through wars, disease or political unrest—the oases could no longer grow enough food to support their population. And soon the towns were abandoned. Sodom and Gomorrah stories of ancient settlements suddenly overwhelmed by sand were plentiful in the folklore across the desert region, but Stein had deduced they were just that. The evidence suggested the settlements had been abandoned slowly. Any jewels and valuables had gone with the departing population. Rumors of bewitched hoards of gold and silver lying within desert ruins were as fanciful as the local belief that anyone attempting to remove these would be driven mad until they threw away their treasure.

  Four frigid months in the desert yielded far more than Stein had hoped for, nearly triple the volume of his entire 1901 expedition. At Abdal, he watched his caravan of camels and ponies loaded with Miran’s finest murals and other antiquities set out on the two-month journey to Kashgar. Stein had temporarily consigned most of his treasures into Macartney’s safekeeping at Chini Bagh. Meanwhile, Macartney updated Stein on his rivals. The French, whom Stein had so feared he would find at Loulan, were far away to the north. So were the Germans. “This sounds hopeful for the next goal,” he confided to Allen.

  That goal was Dunhuang and it lay beyond Turkestan on the edge of Gansu province within China itself, 380 miles across the Lop Desert. China was unknown terrain to Stein and aside from Chiang, his men knew nothing of the country either. But they feared the worst. They were far more uneasy at the prospect of entering China than the desert waste they still had to cross to get there. Turkestan was “God’s own land” to them. It was their home soil; they spoke its language and were part of its culture. Stein’s Indian men had come to enjoy the easygoing, hospitable way of life in the Turkestan oases. Of China, they had heard only alarming rumors of strange customs.

  Stein bid farewell to his Abdal guides, Old Mullah and Tokhta Akhun, whose scrap of paper had led to such spectacular finds. Stein admired how the hardy pair, like their fellow Lopliks, seemed impervious to the extreme climate in which they lived—the icy gales in winter, the mosquitoes and dust storms in summer. Such resilience had no doubt contributed to the long lifespan of so many of Abdal’s inhabitants. Tokhta Akhun had an elderly mother to care for. Even Old Mullah—himself long past middle age—still had his elderly parents, which was why, to Stein’s regret, Old Mullah could not accompany him along the route he had rediscovered. Instead, Stein’s guides on his final leg to Dunhuang would be the voices from the past, including the pilgrim monk Xuanzang and Marco Polo. The Venetian traveler had described the route by which he crossed and estimated it took twenty-eight days. It was still reckoned to do so.

  Having spent so long at Miran, as it yielded such rich rewards, once again Stein needed to hurry. But this time the rush was prompted by the seasons rather than the advance of his rivals. His chosen path was northeast following the old caravan route. Stein knew the route was passable for only a few weeks more. Soon the pure chunks of ice that could be hacked from the frozen salt springs would thaw. Spring would render the heat unbearable and the water undrinkable. With his winter diggings over and the laborers paid off, Stein was looking forward to the crossing since it afforded a rest from the burden of overseeing so many men and excavations. It is a mark of how difficult the winter dig had been—and of Stein’s stamina—that he would approach a 350-mile trek across a frozen desert as a respite.

  He set out for Dunhuang on a morning in late February. Relying on Marco Polo’s estimate, he left with a month’s supplies for his thirteen men, eleven ponies, eight camels, and nearly forty donkeys. The extra donkeys he had hired to carry provisions would be dispatched back to their owners at intervals along the way when no longer needed. But within a couple of days of departing, three died. Soon six donkeys were dead. Stein feared the loss of more would make it hard to transport the supplies. The fates of men and beast were intertwined in the desert. As one after another died, Stein suspected foul play—that the donkey drivers were deliberately underfeeding their charges so their owners could get compensation. He put the entire donkey train under the command of one of his own men, Ibrahim Beg, and he promised the donkey drivers extra money for each animal that survived the journey. The strategy worked.

  The first week passed in exhausting marches of up to twenty-six miles a day along the edge of dried-up salt marshes, clay terraces, and gravel slopes devoid
of vegetation. They were “a drearier sight than any dunes,” Stein told Allen.

  Stein was cheered by Chiang’s good humor and the pair chatted together, Stein in his halting Chinese. “My unmusical ear fails to remember or distinguish the varying tones of the identical syllable & I fear it will take long before others will be as clever as [Chiang] to catch the meaning of my conversation . . . Often we have talked of Marco Polo who had described this old route so truthfully,” he wrote.

  As they camped one night, Stein pulled from his bags Marco Polo’s account of the route and read it to Chiang. It was hardly cheerful reading:

  When travellers are on the move by night, and one of them chances to lag behind or to fall asleep or the like, when he tries to gain his company again he will hear spirits talking, and will suppose them to be his comrades. Sometimes the spirits will call him by name; and thus shall a traveller ofttimes be led astray so that he never finds his party. And in this way many have perished. Sometimes the stray travellers will hear, as it were, the tramp and hum of a great cavalcade of people away from the real line of road, and taking this to be their own company will follow the sound; and when day breaks they find that a cheat has been put on them and that they are in an ill plight. Even in the daytime one hears those spirits talking. And sometimes you shall hear the sound of a variety of musical instruments, and still more commonly the sound of drums. Hence in making this journey ’tis common for travellers to keep close together.