The Road to Samarcand

by Patrick O'Brian

  There came a day when, in the far distance, a low building appeared. On this flat plain it showed for miles and miles, and it seemed as strange and remarkable there as a ship in full sail. They reached it early the next morning, and the column halted. Derrick saw a broad, rough road running straight as an arrow from one edge of the world to the next, and the building stood at its side. They were on the Old Silk Road at last, a road of immeasurable antiquity, once used by innumerable caravans, but now almost deserted.

  Here they were beyond the range of the Chinese bandits, and here the escort turned back, carrying the expedition’s last presents and letters to Hsien Lu, now far away in the east. It seemed strange when the soldiers were gone: they had grown used to their company.

  Derrick explored the low stone building with Chingiz. It appeared to have been built solely for the convenience of horses: there were magnificent stables, but only a few bare rooms for men.

  “I wonder why they built this?” said Derrick.

  “He had it made for horses and messengers,” replied Chingiz.

  “Who?”

  “Why, my ancestor, of course,” said Chingiz, looking surprised.

  “You often speak of your ancestor,” said Derrick, “as if you only had one. Who was he?”

  “He was Khan of the Golden Horde, Emperor of China and Lord of the World.”

  “Hm,” said Derrick, looking sideways at Chingiz. He was almost sure that the Mongol was either boasting or pulling his leg; but when he mentioned it to Sullivan, his uncle said, “Oh, yes. He is descended from the great Khan, all right. Chingiz Khan, or Gengis, as some say, took one of his wives from among the Kokonor Mongols before he was a great man at all: if I remember rightly, it must have been when he was about your age.”

  “And was he Emperor of China and Lord of the World?”

  “Well, he broke through the Great Wall and took Peking, but I rather imagine that it was his grandson Kubilai who was the first Mongol emperor of all China. As for being Lord of the World, well, he certainly didn’t rule in Kansas City—nor in Dublin, for that matter—but he certainly made a good attempt at it. He did rule from Peking to Persia, and maybe beyond: but you ought to ask the Professor if you want to get all the details straight. All I know is that he built this house, and hundreds more all along to beyond Samarcand, and that he had good horses in every one of them and men ready to go out at a moment’s notice to carry messages at a full gallop to the next place, so that he could pass the word from one end of his empire to another in no time at all—or not much, anyway.”

  “Yes,” said the Professor, when they talked about the Great Khan that evening, “he was a very successful man in his way. That is to say, in his wars he caused the death of eighteen million people. He made at least eighteen million homes miserable, and he ravaged a larger tract of country than any man before or since: he did it so thoroughly that what was once useful land is now desert, and will be desert for ever. He was a very successful man in that he accomplished all that he set out to do. But if I were descended from him, I should regard it as my greatest shame, and I should conceal the fact. You may smile, Derrick,” he said very seriously, “but suppose you had a small house of your own, and some fields that gave you your living, and suppose that you belonged to a country that threatened no one. And then suppose one morning you found a troop of savage, hostile men feeding their horses on the crops that were to keep you through the winter, taking away and slaughtering your cattle and then coming to your house, bursting in, stealing all the things you valued and had possessed, perhaps, all your life—things that had been earned or made by your father and grandfather and handed down to you—robbing and then burning the house for fun. Then suppose they killed your children and your wife, and carried you away to work or fight for them for the rest of your life. You would not consider those men very admirable characters, would you? No, nor do I. However hard you try to imagine that misery you will not realise a hundredth part of it: but if you do your best, and then multiply that wretchedness by eighteen million, you will have a remote hint of a conception of how much misery a man who wages aggressive war can cause, and you will begin to understand why I should not be proud of being descended from Chingiz Khan, or any other aggressive barbarian, whatever century or nation he may belong to.”

  “But what about Hsien Lu, sir?”

  “My dear boy, do you not see the essential difference between aggression and self-defence? I have a high regard for the character of a soldier—not that Hsien Lu is a very shining example of that character, perhaps—but none at all for the character of a bully and a thief. A man has a right and a duty to defend his home and his country from attack: if his country is attacked he must defend it, and if he defends it well he is worthy of the highest praise. But if, on the other hand, he sets out to conquer other people—and he will always choose what he considers a weaker nation—then, for all I can see, he instantly degrades himself to the level of a destructive pest, a kind of vermin that should be destroyed as quickly as possible.”

  “I entirely agree with you,” said Sullivan. “Aggressive war is the great crime of the world.”

  “You’re right. And in my opinion much too much fuss is made about bravery,” said Ross, who was as brave as a lion himself. “A man without it is precious little use; but a man may have any amount of it and still be a mean, base creature, a gangster or a half-witted, illiterate barbarian.”

  “Like Chingiz Khan,” said Sullivan, with a smile. “That settles your hero’s hash, Derrick. Now you had better go below—cut along to bed, I mean—or you will never be up in time.”

  The road led on and on, climbing very gradually until they were on a high plateau, and the air was hard and keen.

  “We are coming into my own country,” said Chingiz, sniffing the wind.

  Every day or so they passed one of the Great Khan’s relays, and often they camped in them for the night. The sides of the road were littered with the white bones of horses and camels, and sometimes the picked skeletons of forgotten men, bones that had accumulated through the centuries until now a traveller could hardly go a mile without a grim reminder of his mortality. It was a striking proof of the road’s antiquity and of the great numbers it once had carried. If there had been much vegetation, the bones would hardly have been seen, but there was almost none. Now and then a few patches of low thorn bushes broke the monotony of the even plateau, but there was never a tree to be seen at all, and, as Olaf remarked, a man would be hard put to it to hang himself there.

  It was a strange, deserted world. Sometimes they saw great herds of wild horses, turning and wheeling like cavalry regiments at a distance, but they never approached, any more than the rare steppe-antelopes. They rode day after day without seeing a single trace of a man, and it almost seemed that the rest of humanity had perished, leaving them in a deserted world. Smoke on the horizon or the track of camels that had passed recently became an event.

  Derrick, as the Professor had promised, embarked on the delights of Greek as they rode steadily along in the early morning, and twice a day, under the supervision of Ross, he shot the sun and worked out their precise position, as if they were navigating a ship; he was also unable to escape his mathematics, but in spite of that he spent most of his time with the Mongols. He knew his chestnut pony very well by now, and by dint of hard riding all day and every day, he could almost hold his own with Chingiz as a horseman. He dressed as a Mongol, for their clothes were far and away the most practical for their own country, and he grew to fit the deep Mongol saddle and to feel entirely at home in boots with felt soles several inches thick—the only boots that would really be comfortable in the strange Mongol stirrups. He now habitually greased his face as they did against the biting wind, and he rolled in his walk without having to think of it. He acquired a taste for koumiss, and although he still found it hard to repress a shudder, he could eat horse-flesh with the best of them. What was more important, he grew, by continual practice, to speak Mongol with such f
luency that he no longer had to think of the words. His Mongol was very far from correct, but it came easily, and it improved every day.

  On and on they went, day after day. The grass of the plain became more and more sparse: it no longer covered the ground, and between the tussocks lay sand that deadened the footfall of their beasts and swirled up to fill their eyes and throats in the wind of the afternoon. But for the stones that marked its sides, the road would often have been lost under the sand-drifts: they had entered the Gobi, and the whitened bones showed far more often.

  Derrick, plotting their position on the map, added one more red dot to the thin line of them, a line that marked their passage and that was now wriggling slowly onwards into the heart of the great desert. Each day’s travel was but a tiny advance on the map, but the days had mounted up, and already the red dots extended for hundreds of miles behind them to the Great Wall of China. Before them on the map stretched a much longer pencilled line that showed the route that they intended to follow: here and there small arrows pointed to the places where the Professor hoped to work, to disinter his ancient fragments and to investigate the possibilities of further excavation for a later full-scale expedition from his university, that was to be equipped with much more money, many experts and a large number of workmen for the digging.

  Only once, as they crossed the worst part of the Gobi, did they see any human beings. In the middle of the day a caravan of Tibetans met them, travelling slowly towards China with their yaks and ponies. Some months later they would reach the western Chinese towns, where they would exchange their goods for tea, spend the worst of the winter, and return, after nearly a year’s absence, to their high, cold homes behind the Kunlun mountains. The travellers stopped to take stock of one another and to exchange the news of the road. Derrick looked curiously at them, and at the great mastiffs which walked at the heels of the black, heavily laden yaks. In many ways the Tibetans resembled the Mongols—most of them spoke some Mongol, too—but they were taller men. In some ways their manners were alike, and it seemed to him that the main difference was that the Tibetans were not horsemen, as the Mongols were, and that they were much more concerned with their religion. They were Buddhists of a sort, and every one of them had charms, amulets and prayer wheels stowed somewhere in the greasy clothes which swaddled them about.

  They were not lovely objects, the Tibetans, and they smelt very strongly indeed; but they were friendly and hospitable, and as Derrick sat by their fire, drinking the thick Tibetan tea, full of butter and other curious things, he felt a strange thrill, for there was a certain mystery about these men from the most remote of all the countries in the world, something that set them apart from other men.

  Chang did not care for the Tibetans, or their mastiffs. These were very big dogs, half wild and uncontrollably savage. After Chang had had a set-to with three of them, Derrick tied him up out of harm’s way until the morning, when he awoke to find the Tibetans already gone. They had left in the dark, and but for the smouldering fire of dried yak-dung they might have been a dream.

  The worst of the desert passed under their feet, and they came to the Green Tomb: here they found the thin grass again. The country was just a little less blasted and sterile, and there was enough grazing for wild asses and a few shy antelopes. It was here that they made their first big detour, a long southward curve to the bed of a dried-up lake, where men had once lived in the distant past, although it seemed incredible. The Professor found his site, and he set them all to digging, all except the Mongols, who would have nothing whatever to do with what they considered women’s work.

  It was hard and tedious work, and nobody but the Professor and Li Han cared very much for the results of the long hours of digging: there was nothing but a small heap of dusty, unrecognisable clay objects and bits of broken pot. The Professor was pleased, however, and labelled them all. “This,” he said, holding up a particularly brutish fragment, “may well have been a quern.”

  “A quern,” cried Li Han, rapturously. “Oh, sir!”

  The Professor wrapped it up with care, and they moved off to the next place, three days’ march away. The second site was a repetition of the first: a few barely traceable remnants of wall, dust flying in the cold wind, and at the end of the work a small collection of reddish potsherds and one villainous little broken lamp of primitive design. But this time Olaf did at least find a piece of jade, which excited them all. But when he ran to show it, the Professor gave it a cursory glance and said, “No. I am afraid it has nothing to do with the site. It is quite modern, a hundred years old at the most. Probably some wandering hunter took shelter here and dropped it.” Olaf’s face fell. “But at least,” continued the Professor, not wishing to disappoint him, “it might bring you luck. The characters on it form a charm.” Olaf brightened, breathed heavily on the jade, polished it on his sleeve and put it away in an inner pocket.

  “Ay reckon a man ban a fool who throws away luck on a long voyage,” he said. Olaf persisted in regarding the expedition as a voyage, although they were by now well over a thousand miles from the nearest ocean.

  “It is strange how they have taken to green jade these days,” said the Professor, over supper. “They used to despise it. In the older graves you will find nothing but mutton-fat jade. Take the most famous of all the Chinese collections, the Wu Ti, for example: there is not a single piece of green jade to be found in it. Or, at least, so they tell me. I have never seen it, of course, nor any other European. But the Chinese scholars who have seen the Wu Ti collection assure me that it is quite unrivalled, even in China. What a curse these strong nationalistic feelings are: I am sure that Wu Ti and I would get along wonderfully together, if only he would admit any foreigner to his house. Dear me, I would give a great deal to see that collection.”

  “Then why didn’t you ask Hsien Lu to show it to you?” asked Ross. “It was in Shun Chi’s loot, you know.”

  The Professor dropped his bowl of rice and stared at Ross without a word for some minutes. “Do you mean to say,” he exclaimed at last, “that Shun Chi possessed the Wu Ti collection?”

  “Why, yes,” said Sullivan. “He looted it when he took Chang Fu. Wu Ti had moved it there for safety, and hanged himself when he heard the news. It was the first thing that Hsien Lu looked for in the lorry behind Shun Chi’s tank.”

  The Professor could not get over it. “That priceless jade was being jerked and banged about over mountain roads in that lorry,” he said, “and exposed to the danger of bombs and bullets. Good heavens above. And I was within a few feet of it. And then I was in the same city with it, and on excellent terms with its new owner, and I never knew. How bitterly disappointing.”

  “I would have mentioned it,” said Ross, apologetically, “but it never crossed my mind until this minute.”

  “I am very sorry, too,” said Sullivan. “I ought to have told you. But I did not think you were interested in jade particularly.”

  “Not interested in jade!” exclaimed the Professor, throwing up his hands. “It is my . . . well, well,” he said, in a calmer tone, “it cannot be helped. And, after all, I have my Han bronzes, which are reward enough for all our pains and trouble. Let us not think about it any more.” He smiled round the table to show that he was not at all downcast.

  “I could kick myself,” said Ross. “I am very sorry. But I wonder that Hsien Lu did not think of it himself.”

  “But then,” said the Professor, “if he had shown me the collection, I should certainly have been unable to conceal my admiration, and he would have felt obliged to offer it to me. Of course, I would never have accepted—its market value is truly incalculable—but it would have raised an awkward, disagreeable situation. No, it is all for the best, no doubt. And now let us dismiss the matter from our minds. Let me see, our march tomorrow should take us to this point on the map, should it not?”

  It was three days after this that they came across a deep, rocky gully cut out by a stream that had dried up generations ago, and the
y had considerable difficulty in getting the camels across. When it came to the turn of the camel that carried the Han bronzes, Professor Ayrton skipped about like a cat on hot bricks. “Gently, now,” he cried, as Olaf thumped the camel from behind, while Hulagu pulled in front. “Be very careful, if you please. Take care, the pack will slip! Drive the animal from the other side. No, no, Olaf; this way. Beware of the slope. Look out, look out! Hold it, quick. Derrick, run!” But before Derrick could get there, he heard a slithering noise and then a series of bumps.

  “There,” cried the Professor, wringing his hands, “the pack has slipped. Oh, you clumsy fellow.” With these strong words the Professor sped nimbly down the gully after his bronzes.

  The strong cases and the careful packing had saved them from injury, but the cuckoo-clock and the brass Buddhas were lying all abroad. The clock gave a last strangled crow as they reached it, and then became dumb for ever. The Buddhas, being heavier, had reached the very bottom of the ravine, and one of them had broken against a spur of rock.

  “Look,” cried Derrick, scrambling down, “there is something inside.”

  He knelt by the fragments of the image and picked up several objects, each wrapped over and over again with silk: it was obvious that they had been hidden in the hollow brass.

  The others gathered round, and the Professor unwrapped one of the silken envelopes: it came off in a long ribbon. “They took good care of it, whatever it is,” he said, unwinding steadily. Under the silk there was a piece of cotton wadding. He removed it, and there in his hand was a small tablet of mutton-fat jade covered with an inscription. The Professor gazed at it for a full minute without saying a word.