In Xanadu (52 page)

The rest of that day was spent edging forward in this manner. At six the sun set over the distant Kunlun mountains, darkening the vast emptiness of the desert. Through the rattling of the bus came the quiet murmur of the Muslims saying their evening prayers. It was nearly midnight when we arrived at Niya.

The caravanserai was filthy, cold and had no food, but neither, thankfully, did it have any Public Security guards. We slept like children, but only until five o'clock. To keep ahead of the police we knew we had to be off before dawn. We also thought it wiser to change our transport. If the Keriya police had telegraphed forward to Charchan, the Public Security there would be expecting us on the bus. We guessed that we stood more chance of getting through travelling by truck. So, feeling ill and exhausted, we tramped around the different caravanserai dormitories looking for a driver who was leaving immediately, heading in the right direction and prepared to take us with him. Only one filled all these criteria: as at Khotan, we set off into the desert on top of a pile of coal. To mark the occasion we wore for the first time the 'disguises' we had bought in Keriya. Mine consisted of a Mao suit topped by a green Uigur skullcap; Louisa wore a printed dress and a white veil. From front-on, in broad daylight, neither disguise fooled anyone. Indeed on several occasions they caused hysterical peals of laughter from Uigurs who otherwise might never have noticed us. Nevertheless we thought that the 'disguises' did look vaguely convincing from the back. If ever we came to a checkpoint, we planned to fall forward on our faces and pretend to be asleep. Only the most officious guard would be rude enough to wake a sleeping couple, or so, at any rate, we hoped.

The next two days were exhausting. The constant worry of being detected, occasional pangs of hunger and thirst, the physical effort of digging ourselves out of sand dunes, the day-tine heat and the extreme night-time cold, all these different strains began to take their toll. Particularly unpleasant was the aggressive old man with whom we shared our coal slag. Our relationship got off to a bad start on the first day when, during a mid-morning
cay
stop, I blew my nose in his presence. For this unforgivable
faux pas
I earned myself a violent torrent of abuse. It appears that my crime was twofold: firstly blowing my nose while he was drinking, secondly using a handkerchief. Apparently polite Uigur etiquette demands that one walks away from any imbibing company, raises one's left hand to the ridge of one's nose and blows heartily through the nostrils, aiming to discharge the deposit onto the ground. Any overhang should then be wiped away, and the hand then cleaned on the shirt front. This was certainly how the old man approached the problem. It was on this same
cay
stop that my false front tooth finally fell out. This had a disproportionately lowering effect on my morale. It was now four days since my razor blades had been stolen and the combination of an unshaven yet unbearded face, a weatherworn visage and a gap-toothed smile was clearly an unpleasant one. It was several days before I next saw a mirror and was able to take in the full horror of it myself, but its effects on those around me was immediately obvious. It was about this time that little Uigur children began running away from me, screaming and shrieking for their parents.

That night we reached Charchan. Outside the caravanserai we ne the best kebabs in the world, then slunk quickly off to bed before our 'disguises' caused a riot. Long into the night we could hear the shrieks of laughter outside. Neither of us could sleep. A day exposed to the full glare of the desert sun had given us both bad sunburn, while the night chill was unbearable. We lay awake in our coal-grimed clothes, at once burning and shivering, a combination that was as unpleasant as it was unusual. We were up and waiting for the track driver when he appeared at four-thirty the following morning.

The strain was now really beginning to show. We had been on the move for nearly a week and in that time had only one full night's sleep. Louisa was silent and irritable;
I
had sunk into a state of exhausted, toothless gloom. We had diarrhoea. Our clothes were torn and we were both filthy: neither of us had washed since Keriya. I was a terrible sight; poor Lou looked a little better but felt much worse. The colour had gone from her cheeks and she had ceased to take trouble with her appearance; for the first time she was beginning to look a little dishevelled. The next morning, after another sleepless night in another filthy caravanserai, she finally reached the end of her endurance. The coal truck left Waxari before dawn. Shortly afterwards she said: 'I think that I am going to be sick,' then was, several times. We arrived at the oasis of Charchalik about nine in the morning. There she announced that she was quite simply incapable of going on.

'If I spend one more minute on this truck,' she said quietly but very firmly, ‘I will die.'

We took a bedroom from the club-footed caravanserai keeper. There we ordered a basin of hot water, then washed, dried and lay on our beds wondering how long it would be before the police came to hear of our arrival. They heard very quickly. At quarter past ten there was a knock on the door. Lou was asleep so I got up to open it. Outside stood two Public Security guards.

We were fined and made to sign a confession but we were not sent back. We had got far enough to make it more effort than it was worth. Instead, the next day, we were bundled into a police Jeep and deported northwards out of the security zone to the town of Korla near Turfan. There, still under arrest, we were made to buy tickets to Peking and seen onto the train.

We had got as far as the border of the desert of Lop, what we learned later was the Chinese nuclear testing ground. It was this discovery that gave our final day in Charchalik a special poignancy.

After the police discovered us in the morning, they locked us up in our hotel room, perhaps for lack of anywhere better to put us. That evening they let us out to eat supper. Lou did not feel
li
ke eating, so I was taken on my own to a shabby restaurant owned by a deaf mute. As he was possibly the only other person for five hundred miles who was unable to speak or understand either Chinese or Uigur I felt a certain bond between us and lingered in his cafe, toying with a bowl of chop suey, while the Public Security guard waited by the door. It was only after half an hour that I began to notice how many other cripples there were in the restaurant. It seemed that there was not a single healthy person in the town: some had terrible contorted limbs and strange disfiguring marks on their skin. A few were completely bald; others were thin and wasted. There can only be one explanation for this gathering in one small town. It must have been something to do with radiation from the testing ground. No wonder the police were so quick to deport us: we appeared to have stumbled across an oasis populated by mutants.

EIGHT

We arrived in Peking six days later and several pounds fatter.

Much has been written on the supposed discomfort of Chinese trains. They are meant to be overcrowded, noisy and filthy, their occupants displaying all the worst Chinese vices: boorishness, arrogance and insensitivity. But after the lorries that had taken us across the Taklimakan, we found our Hard Seat (Third Class) carriage on the local freight train pure luxury. It seemed scarcely possible that travel could be so smooth, fast or noiseless. The simplest things gave unimaginable delight. After a fortnight of empty desert the serried ranks of healthy Chinamen seemed something verging on the miraculous. One billion people! And a few of them neither Uigurs or mutants. We stared with numbed incredulity at the fleet of blue-jacketed, pigtailed girls who marched up and down the train, efficiently cleaning the floors, swilling out the loos, and playing patriotic ditties on the in-train tannoy. Through the window, the Taklimakan, as Godforsaken from the north as it had been from the south and the east, looked now as distant and harmless as a picture on a television screen. Nothing out there could pursue us, arrest us, or fine us any longer. We were safe, happy and very nearly comfortable.

At Daheyong it got better still. Here we changed trains and promoted ourselves to a Soft Sleeper (First Class) compartment. There I peeled off my old, stained travelling clothes, and set about relishing the onset of middle age. I vowed never again to travel on a heap of coal slag, never again to stay in a hotel that smelt like a morgue, never again to use a squatter which belched up its contents over the user. I had done all that. If something needed to be proved it was proved. From now it would be a holiday cottage by the seaside, a rocking chair and some new, relaxing hobby, perhaps knitting or crochet.

The Soft Sleeper was a good start to this projected lifestyle. It was the sort of thing we had been dreaming about on top of our coal slag. Each compartment consisted of four beds, two bunks on either side, with a cavernous central space in between. This space was half filled by a wooden table covered by a tablecloth. On top of this floated a porcelain tea set, a pot plant and a reading lamp. Beneath our feet the floor was carpeted in thick Burgundy pile, the bed furnished with a silken quilt. The compartment was as soft as the cell of a lunatic.

We shared it with a most agreeable character. Mr Flying Chicken was a gentleman of Singaporean origin who was remarkable chiefly for his kingly girth and his efforts to maintain it by constant feeding. Mr Flying Chicken was, appropriately enough, a seismologist. He was just returning to Peking after several months working on the earthquake problems of Urumchi. His company clearly valued the services of Mr Chicken for they had supplied him with all that was needed to keep him in good spirits for the duration of the journey, namely one very large hamper. This he tucked into with great enthusiasm. Before our eyes, in a matter of minutes, he consumed batteries of boiled eggs, bean curds barely unwrapped from their boxes, half-salamis imported at great cost from Italy, great lumps of dried pickled fish. These he washed down with cans of Chinese beer and inter-course slices of pineapple pie. But it was the poultry that was most dear to him. From a separate compartment in the hamper Mr Chicken produced a whole, cold boiling fowl. He lifted it aloft with the same reverence as a Catholic priest might lift the host at the elevation. He looked at Louisa and me with hungry eyes.

'Fly Chikky,' he murmured.

After we had made friends with Mr Flying Chicken the journey turned into something of a dorm feast. He shared his poultry with us and in return we offered him a bag of melons we had bought in Turfan. As the afternoon went by we slowly ate our way through Mr Chicken's hamper, until, sometime towards sunset, we reached the bottom. Mr Chicken surveyed the empty hamper with great sadness.

'No chikky, no agg, no pie-pie,' he said.

He picked at the pile of bones on the floor of the compartment, and looked around for something else to consume. There was nothing, and, as a glance at his watch revealed, it was more than two hours until the dining car opened. A look of infinite melancholy clouded his face. For a moment I thought he was going to cry. Then, suddenly, his face brightened.

Tray slow down,' he said.

We listened. He was right. There was no doubt about it. The train vvas pulling into a station. Mr Chicken rose and made to leave the compartment. As he did so he turned and flashed a smile in our direction.

'I go gi' foo. I go gi' fly chikky.'

He returned laden with groceries. It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Where there had been one pie there were now two. Where there had been ten eggs there were now twenty. Mr Chicken's new hoard also contained many delicacies that had not previously graced his hamper. There were sponge cakes and apricots, bags of apples, piles of prawn crackers, great sacks of nuts. But most of all there were chickens. From cradled arms he unloaded a great pile of poultry and stacked up the carcasses on his bed.