Education Of a Wandering Man (1990)

by L'amour, Louis

  Horse racing was the biggest gamble of all, and the Indian was ever ready to come forward with a fast horse he wished to back. The Indians, who knew horses well, were often the winners in these races, never being as gullible as the white men assumed they were.

  Churches or schools held “literaries,” where visiting lecturers appeared or local citizens debated anything that came to mind.

  Bill Nye, the humorist, was a frequent visitor in many western towns, as was Mark Twain.

  One of the amazing aspects of the frontier was the amount of classical research and writing that was going on. Quite often it was done by Army officers out of sheer boredom or pursuing interests of their own far from frontier guard duty or the pursuit of Indian war parties.

  My educational efforts continued. I read The Mississippi Valley Frontier by John Anthony Caruso, English Life in the Middle Ages by Salzman, A Union Soldier’s Diary by Albert W. Mosey, The Natchez by Antoine Simon Le Page du Pratz, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army by Donald W.

  Engels, and My Life and Experiences Among Our Hostile Indians by General O. O. Howard.

  While traveling in France with my family, I had been reading The Campaigns of Alexander by Arrian. Alexander’s problem of supply had intrigued me. I had some minor experience with feeding troops on the march, so it was an interesting question.

  Moving large bodies of troops across country has to create enormous problems of supply, which would have to be well planned in advance. For Alexander, moving across vast stretches of Asia, the problems must have been critical, both for his men and his animals. His intelligence services had to be excellent, to keep him apprised of harvest and crop conditions, for he dare not risk thirty thousand men in an area where there had been crop failures or where there was no grass for his horses.

  In the beginning his army was about that size, but it grew as he conquered new areas and absorbed bodies of troops from the conquered lands.

  Historians often take for granted the movements of armies and their logistical problems, but they were and continue to be critical.

  Personally, I do not believe Alexander needed much persuasion to turn back. In conquering the East he was being conquered by it, and for all his faults I believe he understood this. The core of his magnificent army was the Macedonians, and their strength had been watered down by troops of lesser quality.

  Moreover, before them lay some difficult and dangerous country where he could no longer rely on the information he was receiving. In fact, I should not be surprised if Alexander had himself encouraged the protests to give him an excuse to turn back.

  The forces he had encountered were those of small kings, and the great powers of India lay before him.

  Had he lived, he might have regrouped and returned, starting again with fresh troops added to his Macedonians, and better information than he possessed at that time.

  He had yet to meet the Nanda kings, and the best of India’s fighting men. Yet all this is speculation. Perhaps he had tired of conquest and wished to relax and enjoy what he had done.

  One thing is certain: His legend still lives in those Asiatic mountains where the four worlds meet. After two thousand years, many are anxious to trace their ancestry to him or to his men. They take it for granted that his troops sired many children; some left their Legions and stayed behind. No other conqueror in history had that sort of impact to the same degree, for he created a legend and gave birth to a thousand stories. I think he would have liked that.

  I am a part of all that I have met;

  Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

  Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move.

  How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson from “Ulysses”

  Knowledge—or perhaps in this instance the word information would be better—often comes in strange ways, but just as often in the commonplace passages of every day.

  It was in a bookstore in Belawan, a seaport of Medan in Sumatra that I first heard of the Sejarah Melayu, otherwise known as the Malay Annals.

  The bookstore was small, with limited facilities, but had a curious cross-section of the flimsy popular magazines and the intellectual. I asked about a history of the area, and the clerk seemed either not to understand or did not wish to reveal his ignorance.

  But a very tall, very thin man with very black aquiline features mentioned the Sejarah Melayu. He also assured me it was difficult to obtain.

  A few minutes of discussion led us to a coffeehouse, where we spent the afternoon. The young man was something of a scholar, a Moslem, but one of wide-ranging interests, and he was, as I was, lonely for talk of books, writers, and ideas.

  He had attended school in India and later in Singapore, and now held some sort of government job in Sumatra, but he was a young man of ideas isolated from others of his kind.

  He spoke excellent English with a peculiar accent, and he explained about the Sejarah Melayu. It was a sort of history, he said, a book that had grown from a king list, probably by adding actual historical fact along with folk tales known of the various kings, maharajahs, sultans, and such, beginning with the installation of Seri Turi Buana, said to be a descendant of Alexander the Great, in 1179.

  The procession of the king list and their stories leads finally to Sultan Abdul Rahman Shah in Lingga. He died in 1832 and was followed by his son Muhammad Shah, and the Annals ended with that name.

  The area ruled by the various sultans covered most of the Malay Peninsula and the island of Sumatra. At the northern section of Sumatra was the kingdom of Atjeh, sometimes said to be a pirate kingdom somewhat like those in the Adriatic and adjoining waters in the days of the Roman republic.

  The following day I had to return to my duties aboard ship, my brief leave over.

  There followed some hours of chipping rust, spotting it with red lead, and then repainting with the ship’s colors. I managed to get ashore one more time, in the evening, and was taken to my friend’s home, where he proudly showed me his small collection of European books. It was then I discovered that he read German and French as well as English.

  We dined there quietly, with his family about, seemingly charmed and somewhat awed by their strange visitor. They all seemed cut from the same mold: slender, dark people with large, slow-moving eyes and gentle voices.

  I never saw him again, but did leave with him some novels I had been given and had finished reading, among them Lord Jim, and Hard Times by Dickens.

  A few years later I added to my library the C. C. Brown translation of the Sejarah Melayu. Although some stories date from an earlier time, it seems likely the book itself was written in 1612.

  Being the sort of man I am and considering the life I have lived, it is not surprising that one of the intriguing aspects accompanying the exchange of ideas from culture to culture was the fact that most of the Buddhist pilgrims and teachers were also exponents of the martial arts.

  The basics of kung fu and karate came over the mountains from India or from the Buddhists of Khotan to China and Japan.

  Bodhidharma, a master of the martial arts as well as a wanderer in search of knowledge and a teacher, brought his skills, after much travel, to the famed Shao Lin monastery.

  Bodhidharma was a disciple of one of India’s greatest scholars, Nagarjuna, who originated the doctrine that became Ch’an in China and Zen in Japan. In his wanderings Bodhidharma became known in China as Ta-Mo; in Japan, as Daruma. He is often pictured as an old man with a twig over his shoulder from which a sandal is suspended.

  Bodhidharma was the third son of an Indian king, probably a Pallava, and he was received at court by the Emperor Wu. Some reports have it that he lived long and finally passed away at the Shao Lin; others, that toward the end he left on the Silk Road toward the towns along the Kuen-lun Mountains, perhaps to Khotan.

  At no time in history of which I am aware was the
re such a diffusion of culture between two peoples as that between India and China in the Buddhist period. Pilgrims left China and made the long, fearful trek over the deserts and mountains to India, a journey that at the least took many months, but often years. Others went by sea in the vessels that were trading with India or the Persian Gulf ports. This was a journey of roughly two thousand miles over some of the roughest seas on earth, seas where piracy goes on, even today.

  One of the first Buddhist scholars to reach China was Kumarajiva, who was residing in the Chinese capital as early as A. D. 401. By 412 he had translated more than one hundred Buddhist and other texts from Sanskrit into Chinese.

  We know of dozens of monks who traveled to India and returned, as well as many missionaries from India to China, among them Dharmagupta. He is said to have written a book comprising minute geographical details of the many countries he visited, including details on their system of government, the food they ate, what they drank, wore, and studied. Unfortunately no copy seems to have survived of what would be an extremely valuable book.

  A party of five monks started from China in A. D. 399, led by Fa-hien. At Tun-hwang (the Caves of the Thousand Bu. Has) the local official supplied them with all that was necessary to proceed but with dire warnings of what lay before them, which was the vast desert of the Taklamakan, roughly the size of Oklahoma and Texas combined. This desert is described by Fa-hien, speaking of the perils encountered: “… travellers who encounter them perish to a man. There is not a bird to be seen in the sky above, nor an animal of the ground below. Though you look all about to see where you can cross, you know not where to make your choice, the only mark and indication being the dry bones of the dead, scattered upon the sand.”

  It is the same today. Travelers find it necessary to grease their faces, as the skin becomes dry and cracks, causing bleeding sores. The oldest piece of paper in the world was found on the site of the ancient town of Lou-lan, paper dated (it could still be read) A. D. 130.

  (paper is said to have been invented in China in 106.)

  The desert is so dry that, in nearly two thousand years, that paper had not rotted away.

  On the site of Lou-lan, carved timbers have been found and even standing trees not far away, dead for centuries. Out in this desert there are ruins of vanished cities, perhaps of civilizations, all evidence of changing winds or perhaps of the uplifting of the Himalayas, cutting off the rains that once watered this desert.

  Fa-hien did not return by the same route, but embarked on a large vessel at Tamralipti. After fourteen days he reached Ceylon (sri Lanka) where he remained to study for two years; then, boarding a Chinese merchant vessel, he began a voyage on which all aboard were close to death. He arrived back in China in 414 and began translating the works he had brought back with him. He died at the age of eighty-eight.

  The T’ang dynasty, one of the most glorious in Chinese history, ruled in China from A. D. 618 to 907. Trade, travel, and cultural diffusion probably reached their highest peak during this period, when many Indians were living in China and many Chinese pilgrims were making the long treks to India.

  Many books were translated from one language to the other, and although most were Buddhist, many concerned other aspects of culture, such as mathematics, astronomy, medicine, military tactics, and various aspects of government.

  Nalanda University had become the most famous center of learning in Asia, with thousands of students coming from all parts of Asia to study, and many scholars in residence. Hiuen Tsang, perhaps the most distinguished of the many scholars, was born in A. D. 600 of a Confucian family. He became a Buddhist monk when only twenty and, by the age of twenty-nine, was en route to India. Discontented, as many in China were, with the books and teachings on Buddhism, he decided to go to the source and by the year 630 was studying in India. During the next fourteen years he traveled over much of India, residing for two years at Nalanda.

  I-Tsing, whom I have mentioned before, was one of those who followed Hiuen Tsang to India, leaving by sea in 671. After several years of study in Shrivijaya in Sumatra, he reached India and studied at Nalanda during the years A. D. 675 to 685.

  This exchange of scholars and of manuscripts continued all through the next several centuries, the connections depending much on the conditions of travel and of occasional warfare between intervening nations. (the scholars were almost always exempt from this, being passed between warring armies with few problems.)

  Travel in what has been known as Sinkiang or Chinese Turkestan has never been a simple thing. The Silk Road skirts the Taklamakan Desert on the south along the base of the Kuen-lun Mountains, the second-highest range—and perhaps the least-known —in the world. Another branch follows a northern route through Aksu. Both are usually beset by bandits, and travel is at all times difficult. Sandstorms are common, the desert route has few watering places, and accommodations are primitive by Western standards.

  The people are of a variety of nationalities.

  Only a few are Chinese, of the Han variety; most are of Turkish descent. It is a harsh and haunted land, yet one that can be rarely beautiful, and one that has been crossed and recrossed by scholars seeking wisdom, or at least a better understanding.

  Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion by W. Bartold proved an excellent book, and I followed it with Howorth’s great study of the Mongols in five volumes. I then went on to read Burton Watson’s translation of Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s Shih-Chi, and followed it with Pan-Ku’s History of the Former Han Dynasty, the oldest histories of China to which we presently have access.

  From those first years at home and in the Jamestown Public Library, books have been an adventure. A fast-moving boxcar, what we often called a “side-door Pullman,” was as easy a place to read as anywhere else, and I read some good books while en route.

  As I have been writing this book, old memories of books read return to me, among them Jack London’s Burning Daylight, which I read on a bus traveling through Texas, and Gogol’s Taras Bulba, which I read one bitterly cold night in Paris.

  I had come there with a convoy of empty tank trucks to draw gasoline. A few hours before, we had been far up the line and had delivered our gas and turned in. Minutes later, we had been awakened and told to get the hell out of there, that the Germans were attacking.

  We were on the road within minutes, thus escaping the Battle of the Bulge.

  For hours we had waited to gas up and return. The officer in charge of the gas dump was so fearful of saboteurs that he would not open even for us. (as the Germans had begun the strike that culminated in the Battle of the Bulge, they had dropped a number of four-man sabotage teams over the country, most of them equipped with American arms, jeeps, and such. I had captured two men of one such team near the big gas dump at Chartres, but they were in German uniforms.)

  Supposedly these were hand-picked men, trained for their jobs, and the officer in command of the dump in Paris had been briefed. The difficulty was that in his case sabotage was not necessary; all the Germans had to do to put the dump out of action was scare him enough. Only at daylight did we finally succeed in convincing him it was safe.

  It was bitterly cold that night and each of us made out as best we could, no fires being tolerated so close to the dump. Drivers huddled in the cabs of their trucks, and my driver and I did as well as we could in an enclosed jeep. My driver took over the back seat and, wrapped in his army overcoat, seemed to make out pretty well.

  Every now and again I got out of the jeep and walked along my empty tank trucks, just checking. No Germans appeared and I was just as happy to be left alone. Most of the night I read Taras Bulba and wished for daylight and, hopefully, a warm sun.

  When one takes the time to survey the efforts that have been made to preserve man’s record on earth, the results are astonishing. Upon consideration, it becomes apparent that this need to leave some account of his presence here has been most important.

  His great walls, his pyramids, and his temples are an important but
minor aspect, for obviously the most important has been the written word. Man has endeavored by every means possible to explain his being here, where he hopes to go, and how he plans to go about it.

  Is this explanation only for himself and his peers? Or does he hope to explain to future generations what he has been, thought, and wondered?

  At a quick glance we might accept the idea that men write to themselves, that they ask their questions and pose their replies for others of their kind. But is that all?

  It seems to me that every written word is an effort to understand man’s place in the universe.

  What is he? What is he becoming?

  Will he populate the infinite number of planets that lie out there waiting? Or has that been done already by other forms of life?

  We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.

  What has been offered here is one man’s quest for knowledge, in which he is much less impressed by what he has done than by what has not been done. Along the way I have written some stories—stories for people I have known about people I have known. These stories contain moments of drama because their intent is to entertain, but woven into their lines is much about how men have lived, fought, and survived. The world in which I have lived has often been a harsh, bitter one, but it has always been tinged with romance. I doubt I could have endured the one without the other.

  In Sinkiang and the Pamirs, the Taklamakan and some parts of Tibet, when one party meets another on the way, the greeting is often “May there be a road!” It is a land of frequent snowslides, rockslides, and cave-ins. Roads are casually made; bridges are usually hanging from ropes, so the saying is apropos: One hopes the way will be clear, the road open. So as one pilgrim to another, I leave you with that wish: “May there be a road!”