Journeys on the Silk Road (10 page)

—
VERSE
11,
THE
DIAMOND
SUTRA

5

The Angels’ Sanctuary

New Year’s Day dawned brightly and the wind dropped as Stein headed away from Loulan and southwest toward the Tarim River. The terrain changed from clay terraces to sand dunes that grew in height as he continued. Fuel was scarce. Just a few armfuls had been gathered by the time his party halted for the evening. There was enough to make tea and cook a meal, but too little to sustain a warming fire. That night was the coldest of the winter and the temperature fell to minus sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. It was a cheerless start to what would become the greatest year of Stein’s life, though one that would cost him dearly.

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.