Journeys on the Silk Road (22 page)

After his side trip to Bezeklik, Stein pushed west and soon marked his second Christmas of the expedition. A few days into 1908, boxes of chocolate reached him from the Allens in Britain. Stein immediately penned a gracious thank-you—one that illustrates his utilitarian approach to food. For Stein, even the rare luxury of chocolate was simply a means to stave off hunger pangs and supplement his diet. “How often I have thanked you at the late hours of the night when dinner was still far off & a headache approaching as a reminder of bodily needs, for your incomparable forethought! I shall need such nourishing & tasteful ‘iron reserves’ for the next few months too, for quick marches are needed to make up for time.”

A couple of spills delayed his pace. Two cases and a camera fell into a canal and were soaked. A few days later, two rutting camels absconded and the rest of the day was spent tracking them. But these were minor hitches compared with the sorrowful tidings the new year brought for Chiang. Since he’d set out with Stein, Chiang had hoped for word of his elderly father. At Kucha he intercepted a letter to his uncle in Kashgar and learned the reason for the long silence. Chiang’s father had died twenty months earlier. Grief-stricken, he lamented most that his sixty-four-year-old father had not seen him reach high office. Despite his usual skepticism about such rites, Chiang abandoned his customary bright silk clothes, dressed in dark cotton mourning, and arranged a funeral feast for his father’s long-departed soul.

As Chiang grieved, Stein made preparations in Kucha for their return to Khotan on the far side of the Taklamakan Desert. In Khotan, he would pack all of his antiquities for their journey to India and London. To reach Khotan, he planned to cross the desert by a perilous shortcut he had learned about from a guide on his first expedition. The route was known as the old “Thieves’ Road” and was once favored by “robbers and others who had reason to avoid the highways.” To some it might seem appropriate that the man who removed so many treasures would make his exit via a route so named.

The course was riskier than any he had ever attempted. No European had been known to cross the Taklamakan from north to south. Although Sven Hedin had traveled in the opposite direction in 1896, Stein’s plan was far more dangerous. The reason is simple: Hedin followed the Keriya River until it disappeared into the Taklamakan’s sands. Hedin knew that if he continued north, the west-to-east flowing Tarim River would cross his path. (Upon finding the Tarim River, Hedin sailed along it while dining on wild duck, pheasant, and rice pudding.)

But Stein’s plan meant he had to leave the safety of the Tarim River and locate the very spot amid the dunes where the Keriya River trickled out. There were no maps other than Hedin’s. Even if Hedin had mapped it perfectly, the river could have changed course by miles in the intervening twelve years, leaving Stein at risk of traveling parallel to—or even away from—the water. Why Stein undertook so dangerous a shortcut is unclear. He was determined, certainly, but never foolhardy. He was no longer racing the Germans or the French. And even if a rival expedition should suddenly emerge from the desert dunes, Stein had already secured his glittering prizes from the hidden library. Although he justified the journey by a desire to save time—and see some ruins—it was the pull of the desert itself that seemed irresistible. “I must confess that, even without this specific reason, I might have found the chance of once more crossing the very heart of the desert too great an attraction to resist.”

His antiquities, his “precious but embarrassing impedimenta,” could not come with him. Instead, he sent them under the care of Chiang and pony man Tila Bai along a safer and better known route that followed the Khotan River. For more than an hour on a cold winter day, all traffic in the narrow street of Kucha was blocked as the caravan of twenty-four heavily laden camels began their journey south to Khotan. If all went well, Stein would see Chiang and the antiquities again in two and a half months.

He needed a local guide before he could set out across the desert with his smaller party. But none of the potential guides knew anything about the alleged shortcut. They knew only the route his antiquities were taking. Even the most experienced guide in the area, a stooped hunter in his eighties named Khalil, denied any knowledge of such a route. Khalil walked with difficulty but could nonetheless ride, and he agreed to escort Stein to the Tarim River. It was better than nothing. From there, Stein would negotiate his way unaided through 200 miles of waterless towering dunes toward the river’s end. Little wonder his conscripted laborers were reluctant, despite the promise of extra wages. First they argued they were unfit for such a journey or lacked ample clothing. Then they fell on their knees and prayed for release from dreaded sufferings and certain disaster. Who could blame them?

Eventually, led by Khalil, Stein’s party of twenty men, fifteen camels (including eight to carry ice) and four ponies, carrying enough food for six weeks, headed toward the distant ocean of sand. After nearly two weeks of marching, they encountered a line of poplars tenaciously clinging to life on the edge of a dry river bed. But perhaps not for much longer. Water from the Tarim River that once ensured their survival no longer reached the trees, according to Khalil. It was hardly an auspicious sign as they were poised to enter the desert on January 31. Before turning back, old Khalil delivered a farewell blessing, one that might have unsettled, rather than comforted, the nervous assembly. “He gave it with more ceremony than I should have expected for the occasion, turning towards Mecca in a long prayer, and the men all joining loudly in the ‘Aman’. From Khotan to Lop-nor I had made more than one start into desert quite as forbidding, without ever witnessing such a display of emotion.”

The marches through the sand dunes were exhausting. Everyone walked on foot, some days covering fifteen miles. After eight days they reached a dried-up delta somewhere in which the Keriya River died away. But where? “Nowhere in the course of my desert travels had I met ground so confusing and dismal,” Stein subsequently confessed. The view in all directions was bewilderingly uniform: endless dunes interspersed with stumps of dead trees and tamarisk cones—strange mounds that form as sand buries the tamarisk tree until only the top boughs are visible.

“My secret apprehension that our real trouble would begin on reaching this dead delta was about to be fully verified. It was as if, after navigating an open sea, we had reached the treacherous marsh-coast of a tropical delta without any lighthouses or landmarks to guide us into the right channel,” Stein wrote.

His anxiety increased as each day passed without sight of the river. In the first days of the journey, wells dug into the sand had yielded only a little moisture, and Stein noted how the ears of the ponies would prick up at the sound of hoes striking mud. But as successive efforts to locate the source of the Keriya River proved futile and additional wells dug up to sixteen feet into the ground surrendered nothing, spirits sank. Water was rationed to one pint per man a day. It was a meager amount for hard marching across endless dunes. The camels received little food and no water. “How the camels held out so far is a wonder,” Stein wrote in his diary eleven days after Khalil’s ominous farewell.

By then the camels and ponies were being fed twigs for the moisture in the sap. Although Dash survived on saucers of Stein’s tea, the ponies suffered badly. Stein knew they could not last much longer. On February 12, he counted the cartridges in the holster of his revolver to ensure he could end their suffering if necessary. The mood of the laborers was darkening and Stein feared they might steal what little ice was left. He assigned Lal Singh to guard the remaining supply. Twice in the night when Stein approached to check on its safety, he was challenged by his own surveyor. Stein had little sleep and was awake by 3 a.m.

By daybreak the laborers were on the verge of mutiny and refused to travel further. To turn around would have meant certain death. There was enough water for the men to last just a few days but nowhere near enough to retrace their steps to the Tarim River. They continued with Stein, but he knew time was running out. Lal Singh was ordered to halt the caravan and prepare what Stein termed a “starvation camp.” Even the camels, without water for nearly two weeks, were reaching the limits of their endurance. Stein left his caravan behind and marched on until he reached a 300-foot dune. With Dash at his side he trudged to the summit. He scoured the distance through his binoculars. Four miles to the south, he could see four white streaks. Ice? Salt? Or the desert traveler’s cruelest tormentor, a mirage?

News of Stein’s sighting spurred his exhausted men. So too did the sight of footprints made by a bird that the laborers knew lived near fresh water. As they continued, a camel boy who had surged ahead rushed back toward them. He was too breathless to speak but carried a chunk of ice from the elusive river. When he recovered, he shared his life-saving news: the river was just half a mile ahead. The caravan crested one more dune and looked down on a glittering sheet of clear ice about 500 feet wide. The river had indeed changed course since Hedin’s journey. The men rushed to the river bank and fell on their knees to drink the water. The camels and ponies swelled visibly as they slaked their thirst. After sixteen days of marching across the Taklamakan’s dunes, they had at last found the end of the Keriya River.

A bodhisattva who still depends on notions to practice generosity is like someone walking in the dark.

VERSE
14,
THE
DIAMOND
SUTRA

11

Affliction in the Orchard

Six weeks after Stein located the life-saving river, he reached Khotan and was relieved to find his heavy caravan of antiquities had already arrived. They were stored at the house of Akhun Beg. Stein was overjoyed to be reunited with his elderly friend, who had returned from his own perilous journey, a pilgrimage to Mecca. Stein set up his tent in Akhun Beg’s garden, beneath blossoming plum and apricot trees. But he had little time to enjoy the brief Turkestan spring. Ever since he’d left the abandoned sanctuary at Miran a year earlier, Stein was eager to return to where he had found the exquisite winged angels—and endured the most putrid ruins of his career. In his race to Dunhuang, he had abandoned his labors in the freezing filth without extracting all he knew lay buried there. Although Miran was 650 miles east of Khotan, this was his last chance to document, photograph, and remove the murals that remained. He could not go himself—he had other work to do—so he dispatched his Indian handyman, Naik Ram Singh. The young man, from a family of carpenters, had proved a reliable, versatile worker. He was strong, stoic, and quick to turn his hand to a range of tasks, including sketching, surveying, and developing photographic negatives. Stein knew the resourceful Naik could work without direction and so had no reservations about sending him, with Ibrahim Beg for assistance, on the 1,300-mile round trip.

Meanwhile, Stein prepared to head in the opposite direction, west, for further explorations before the summer heat arrived. Just before he left Khotan, a parcel arrived from Fred Andrews. It contained a fountain pen, pince-nez spectacles, and a much-needed new pair of gloves. “I could not help smiling when I read how carefully you had considered the colour of the gloves,” Stein wrote to Andrews. “You must think me quite a dandy in the desert, whereas in reality it is hard to look even respectable. You would make eyes if you would see me in my winter clothes, worn etc. almost beyond patching.”

Stein traveled as far as the oasis of Yarkand, where he made the first of many partings. He needed to sell his team of hardy Bactrian camels, which would no longer be needed. Yarkand was a crossroads and, with the trading season about to start, he expected to get a better price for them there than in Khotan. As the weather warmed, camel man Hassan Akhun had shorn the double-humped beasts of their magnificent thick winter coats leaving them looking naked and gaunt. Nonetheless, their fame had spread along the desert oases as a result of their remarkable survival down the Thieves’ Road. Eager buyers vied for the legendary animals, despite their high desert mileage after nearly two years of travel. The frugal Stein was delighted; he made a 70 percent profit on the deal. As a farewell gesture, he fed each camel a large loaf of bread before relinquishing the reins to their new owner, an Afghan trader.

Buran season arrived while Stein was in Yarkand and a violent two-day sandstorm brought down trees and destroyed ripening mulberries and apricots in the oasis. By the time Stein left, he had to contend with intense heat as well. He traveled by night but several times lost his way in the wind and darkness. “On one occasion when no light could be kept burning in the lantern there was nothing for it in the howling Buran but to lie down […] & wait for the dawn,” he wrote.

He was pleased to return to the shelter of Khotan in June, although he knew an enormous task awaited. He needed to pack everything he had gathered in the previous two years for the journey to India and, from there, to Europe. Akhun Beg’s residence was too small to accommodate all of Stein’s finds. He needed the space afforded by his favorite garden palace, Narbagh, with its pavilions, orchard, and beds of lilies. Since the previous year, when he had been guest of honor at a lavish feast, Narbagh’s owner had died and the garden was divided between his heirs. The central pavilion, the most suitable place for summer quarters, had gone to the man’s formidable dowager. She was reluctant to relocate a silkworm nursery, and it was only with the aid of an old Afghan friend that Stein managed to persuade her to house his large entourage.