Journeys on the Silk Road (7 page)

From his Kashgar listening post of Chini Bagh, Macartney represented British interests and subjects in the region. The latter were mostly Hindu money-lenders from distant Shikarpur in India’s Sindh province who had spread across Turkestan plying a trade prohibited to Muslims. About the money-lenders, few had a good word to say. Their interest rates were exorbitant and locals unable to repay their debts risked becoming virtual slaves. So it was little wonder there were tensions between the two groups that Macartney had to smooth out. These had political implications as British prestige and influence could suffer because of the behavior of its subjects.

Macartney regularly sent his masters secret bulletins apprising them of incidents around the oases. They learned, for example, how a Muslim woman had been caught in the room of a Hindu cook. A 500-strong mob of men wanted her stoned and the cook’s face blackened. Peace was eventually restored and the cook fined fifty rupees—the woman’s fate is unknown.

As George Macartney kept his eye on British interests and Russian movements, his wife transformed the modest house, which until her arrival had been inhabited by single men, into an oasis within an oasis. The more exotic pets of Macartney’s bachelor days departed. “Wolves, leopards, and foxes did not appeal to me,” Mrs. Macartney commented. Instead, a pair of geese took up residence within the house, and one could often be found nestled beside Mrs. Macartney in the drawing room. Despite the livestock, Stein described Chini Bagh as having all the comforts of an English home. Mrs. Macartney installed lamps and rugs and even a well-traveled Cramer piano that survived at least one soaking in a river on its way across Russia. The couple’s first child, Eric, also survived the accident-prone trip. Born while his parents were on leave in England in the autumn of 1903, the boy was just five months old when he was wrapped in bedding and carried on horseback over mountains. “Baby had three falls, two on the snow . . . & another on the hard ground . . . [but he] did not even wake during these mishaps,” Macartney wrote to Stein. By the time Stein returned to Kashgar in 1906, Mrs. Macartney had just given birth to Sylvia, the second of her three children.

Mrs. Macartney soon got to grips with local customs, at times to her own embarrassment. She quickly learned that the Hindu guard of honor who greeted her arrival with rupees in the palms of their hands were offering respect. She was expected to touch the money, not pocket it. She created a shady garden and an orchard of peaches, apricots, figs, and mulberries. She took charge of the staff, including three Indian servants in red and gold uniforms topped with white turbans. And she oversaw the gardener, a man who appeared to have direct communication with his vegetables. When she once asked him when the peas would sprout, he replied: “They tell me they will be coming out tomorrow.”

Although she lacked female compatriots—she was visited by only three English women in all her years there—she observed, and at times entertained, local women, including Chinese women with bound feet. Barbaric as the practice seemed, she wondered if it was any worse than the tight corseting in vogue among their European counterparts. She also observed the rituals under way at a shrine just opposite Chini Bagh, where young Muslim women came to pray for husbands. “I sometimes suspected that their prayers were answered pretty quickly, for I often saw youths wandering about near the shrine, furtively inspecting the supplicants.”

As the nights warmed during his two weeks at Kashgar in June 1906, Stein pitched his tent under the trees in Chini Bagh’s garden. Although the walls of the residence were two feet thick, to insulate against the winter cold and summer heat, Stein preferred to sleep under canvas. He liked the relative cool—and perhaps the solitude. Some nights the sounds of the Cossacks singing Russian airs carried to Chini Bagh, where they mingled with the call to prayer from the nearby Id Kah mosque and Kashgar families returning from their orchards singing melodies that reminded Stein of Hungarian songs he knew from his childhood.

The capricious Petrovsky had been replaced since Stein’s previous visit by a more amiable Russian consul, Colonel Kolokoloff. Father Hendricks still paid his regular visits, although he was a less robust figure than before. Elsewhere in Kashgar, little had changed. Thursday was market day in the old city of about 40,000 people. Women in their finery paraded in loose red gowns, matrons wore pork pie hats atop their long plaits and young women tucked a marigold or pomegranate flower behind their ears. Stalls in the market square were piled with the summer fruits that had ripened just as Stein arrived. The narrow side streets were filled with specialist bazaars. Cotton merchants filled one section, grain merchants another. The sounds of blacksmiths and silversmiths rang out. Hatmakers stitched velvet caps with fur for winter or embroidered them for summer. In the tea shops, people rested from the heat as musicians plucked instruments and storytellers spun their yarns.

But the leisurely life in the fertile oasis frustrated Stein, who grumbled to Allen about its “easy-going slackness” and the difficulty in hiring artisans during summer when picnics and garden parties were the main occupation. For a man in a hurry, he had arrived in Kashgar at the worst time. “It cost great efforts to catch the carpenter, smither, [and] leather-worker I needed and still greater ones to keep them at work.” Saddles needed repairing, clothes needed sewing and, most importantly, animals needed purchasing—camels especially, as these would be the core of his desert caravan. Stein was alarmed to discover how much prices had increased in the thriving oasis. He bought eight well-seasoned camels within a week of arriving. They were double-humped Bactrian camels whose thick seasonal coats can withstand the region’s extreme temperatures. It pained Stein to shell out triple the amount for each beast that he paid on his first expedition. At least ponies were still a bargain, about a tenth of the cost of his camels. In Kashgar’s weekly animal market he snapped up a dozen of them to convey his team and some of the lighter baggage. Although never reckless with money, Stein had to administer his meager government budget carefully.

He also had formal visits to pay. His first call on a well-heeled Chinese official turned into an impromptu feast of eighteen courses. It was accompanied by knives and forks rather than chopsticks, but the food itself was so mystifying that even Macartney struggled to identify some of the dishes. Such prolonged banquets could be wearing to the dyspeptic Stein, not least because he preferred a simple diet, but they helped forge useful friendships.

Stein needed more men, too, so he was overjoyed when his former camel man, Hassan Akhun, signed on. Stein admired the camel man’s inquisitiveness. Hassan Akhun knew his own mind and took great care of his camels. Stein sensed in him a kindred spirit, a man who welcomed adventure. In Stein’s view these traits outweighed an explosive temper. On their first trip together, Hassan Akhun had become so embroiled in a fight with another man that the explorer had been forced to separate the combatants with his antique walking stick.

Stein was less thrilled to see his former interpreter, Niaz Akhun. Stein knew more than he cared to of this worker’s shortcomings, which included an “inordinate addiction to opium and gambling, and his strong inclination to qualified looting.” Not to mention womanizing. Niaz Akhun’s amorous encounters during the first expedition had so outraged locals and Stein’s Muslim workers that he had to be isolated for his own safety. The philanderer had become so enamored with a “captivating Khotan damsel of easy virtue,” as Stein coyly described her, that he abandoned his family and divorced his wife. Inevitably the romance soured and Niaz Akhun had gambled and drifted his way back to Kashgar. Stein did not offer him his old job, but gave him some silver, which was soon sacrificed to the “God of the Dice.” Stein also needed to replace his troublesome cook, whose abilities had “shrivelled up with the cold” as they had crossed the mountains. He settled for a rough Kashmiri named Ramzan, “a hardy plant though not sweet to look at.”

Chiang, the man Macartney had recommended as Stein’s secretary, arrived. Like many of the Chinese who filled the civil offices in Turkestan, Chiang hailed from Hunan, nearly 3,000 miles to the southeast. He had left behind his home, wife and son seventeen years earlier and had been engaged in the
yamen
in the oasis of Yarkand, 120 miles from Kashgar. Clearly, Chiang was a man able to cope with long separation from family.

But he also knew his own worth. His terms were high—120 rupees a month and his own servant—but made in the knowledge that Chinese gentleman clerks in the remote province were well rewarded. And unlike most of Stein’s other men, he had no fear of the “Great Gobi” (the blanket term was used to cover the Taklamakan Desert as well). The only problem was that Chiang’s grasp of Turki, the language intended as their shared tongue, was shaky. He spoke little of it despite his many years in Turkestan, and his accent was almost impenetrable. But Chiang impressed Stein with his engaging manner and his “lively ways, frank and kindly look, and an unmistakable air of genial reasonability . . . Something in his round jovial face and in the alert gait of his slight but wiry body gave me hope that he would know how to shift for himself even on rough marches and among the discomforts of desert camps,” Stein wrote. Hiring Chiang would prove one of the wisest decisions Stein ever made.

As the days were filled amassing his caravan, Stein had little time to unwind in the evening with his friends on Chini Bagh’s flat roof. He was juggling another deadline. He needed to finish proofreading his account of his first expedition,
Ancient Khotan,
and get the corrections in the mail. From Kashgar he could get the proofs back to England relatively quickly, within about twenty days, using the overland Russian mail route. He also wrote many letters to friends in Europe. It was his last chance to avail himself of this postal system. Once he left Kashgar, his mail would have to be relayed by “
dak
runners.” These formed a network of hardy native postmen who carried their mailbags across the desert and over the mountains to India. Three times a month,
dak
runners crossed between Kashgar and Hunza. When camped in the desert, Stein allowed up to three months for his mail to reach Europe. A telegraph line existed between Kashgar and Beijing, but the poles were sometimes knocked over by fierce storms and even bears. The animals mistook the humming of the wires for bees.

Meanwhile, Macartney had an update on the Germans. They had crossed to Kucha, far away on the northern Silk Road, and were still undecided about where to go next, India or China. Stein feared the latter and that they might head for Lop Nor and Dunhuang. Of Pelliot’s team, there was no news, only vague rumors among the Russians. “They may turn up any day—or a month hence,” he speculated to Allen.

He believed he could still keep ahead of the Frenchman, who would need most of a month to put his caravan together in Kashgar while Stein’s was nearly ready. But if Pelliot did arrive, Stein would have to consider crossing the desert in the baking summer heat, an extremely risky prospect. He hated having to work in such haste, constantly looking over his shoulder, fearful he might find a rival behind every sand dune. “The rush past places which might still yield something to me is by no means an attractive idea for me, and the heat will be trying . . . You will understand, with your infinite sympathy, how weary work it is to have to watch for others’ moves, instead of being free to follow one’s own plans straight,” he wrote.

At last Stein’s caravan was ready. Ahead of an early morning departure, he bid farewell to his Kashgar friends, except one. Stein had not seen Father Hendricks in those final busy days. But Mrs. Macartney had and thought he looked particularly frail, although he still managed a cheerful word for her baby daughter. She had previously offered to take the old priest in and nurse him. Typically, he had refused and was determined to remain alone. So as Stein was occupied with last-minute preparations on his final day in Kashgar, Macartney decided to visit Hendricks’ hovel within the old city walls. There he discovered that his friend, the purveyor of gossip and good spirits, lay dead. The priest had been ailing for months, but his lonely death, apparently of throat cancer, had come more quickly than anyone expected.