For forty days Przhevalsky roamed the wind-swept, snow-covered chasms of the Altyn Tag, enduring all the rigours of a Tibetan winter that he had undergone four years before. In Charkhalyk they had eaten a Christmas dinner of goose, pirozhki (Russian pies) and brandy. Now they were reduced to rice and raisins, which were carried by two donkeys. The Altyn Tag was far poorer in fauna than other parts of Tibet. All Przhevalsky could shoot were hares. The exposed rock faces were arid and the party had to carry a sack of ice for drinking water. Snow blocked the passes. Przhevalsky had to rely on information from his guides, who described the route taken by Turghud Mongols on their pilgrimage to Lhasa over the Altyn Tag and the two other ranges of the Kun Lun system that lay beyond.
On 15/27 January 1877 Przhevalsky celebrated the tenth anniversary of his departure from Warsaw for an explorer’s life; his luck returned. A wild camel appeared, sniffing at the domestic camels of the expedition. By the time the Cossacks realized that the stranger was not one of their camels and Przhevalsky had seized his Lancaster, it had galloped off out of range. It was the rutting season and the male camels were herding their harems into gorges. Przhevalsky never succeeded in shooting one, but at the end of March native hunters brought him three skins and a skull, beautifully prepared according to his instructions. He was convinced that the camels were original wild fauna, not feral escapees: he had made his first major contribution to zoology. But the Petersburg zoologists could not determine whether Przhevalsky’s specimens were the original wild stock, from which the domesticated two-humped Bactrian camel was bred, or animals which had escaped from caravans or survived the death of their drovers to become feral. Modern scientists, with their more sophisticated techniques, have no wild camels to test.
Only at the end of this excursion did Przhevalsky kill a kulan and a yak, and the party then had their fill of meat. Blizzards made hunting out of the question afterwards, and in any case it was time to descend to Lob Nor, where the spring migration began in February.
Lob Nor, in Przhevalsky’s day, was fed by the waters of the Tarim, or what was left of them after evaporation in the desert and diversion by the natives. It was freshwater near the reedy marshes where the Tarim ended and brackish elsewhere. But in mediaeval times Lob Nor was farther to the north-east and entirely saline. Thus it was marked on Chinese maps. Przhevalsky’s discovery of a freshwater lake in another place was to stir scientific circles considerably. Not until the 1920s, when erosion, natural and artificial, caused the Konche Darya to break away to the east and take with it most of the Tarim’s waters, and Lob Nor reappeared in its mediaeval position, were geographers to come to terms with the ‘nomadic’ rivers and lakes of Kashgaria.
At Lob Nor Przhevalsky met the most primitive of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, the Khara Khoshun (Black Fief) tribe, who lived by fishing and hunting in the reeds. Living in reed huts, with a pit dug in the marsh for a fireplace, they led an iron-age existence, importing only a little cloth, and using skin, plant-fibres and the ubiquitous reeds to serve all their needs. Their boats were dug-out tree trunks; their iron tools were primitive in the extreme. The Khara Koshun chieftain, Kunchikan Bek, was soon on good terms with Przhevalsky. When he ate Przhevalsky’s last box of monpansier, he brought an onion and mutton tart in recompense. Their conversations gave Przhevalsky material for one of his best ethnological studies; at Lob Nor he had a rare flash of insight into, and sympathy with, the barbaric. The inhabitants of Lob Nor were possibly aborigines, for their features were Indo-European as well as Mongol. They were nominally Moslem, but their burial practices showed traces of earlier religions, for they buried the dead in the reeds with their fishermen’s possessions. It was a hard life, dependent on the weather and the fish; the Khara Khoshun were often stricken by smallpox, and when disease came a whole village would abandon its sick and camp out in the reeds.
As soon as he arrived in Charkhalyk Przhevalsky learnt to his amazement that he was not the first Russian to visit Lob Nor. The inhabitants still recalled the arrival of a hundred or so Russian old believers in 1861. The old believers secretly left their farms in Siberia and went off in search of the sect’s legendary promised land of Belovodye—literally, White Waters. Some deep folk-instinct must have led them south to Lob Nor: almost certainly the name Lob is Indo-European, cognate with the Latin albus, white, and Lob Nor, too, once meant White Water. Arriving on pack horses, the Russians apparently tried to settle in the reeds. But the damp summers killed most of the horses with insect-borne infections and they moved to Charkhalyk, where they were said to have built a wooden church. Only after further attempts to settle there, farming and hunting kulans (which they called Polish horses), even crossing the Altyn Tag to settle in the Gas oasis, did they give up their promised land. The Chinese authorities in Turfan sent them horses and supplies and they headed north for Siberia. But the Tungan rebellion broke out before they could cross the Tien Shan; all traces of them were obliterated and little is known of their fate, except that one girl, Pelageya Rakhmanova, was abducted by the Bey of Turfan and became his favourite wife.
When the salt-dust laden atmosphere allowed, Przhevalsky spent most of the days of March 1877 watching the birds flock to Lob Nor after crossing the Tibetan plateau at its narrower, western end, and flying east to feed and nest. Przhevalsky and his men shot so enthusiastically that they soon ran out of lead and were compelled to husband their rifle bullets by hunting only the larger waterbirds and the eagles. Their cooking cauldron simmered every day with twelve brace of duck, which somehow they consumed in three meals of game a day. By the beginning of April there seemed little new to observe or shoot: the millions of birds on Lob Nor belonged to only twenty-seven species. The only mammal new to science was a furry-tailed rodent, a gerbil, Brachiones przewalskii; Przhevalsky flooded its holes and collected the drowned specimens.
But there was no question of going on to Tibet. One by one the camels had been overcome by dust and humidity; only five were still alive. Without camels and without guides, and on a track unused for fourteen years, Przhevalsky could not risk going on to Lhasa. In any case his diary records, ‘I don’t have the strength to go through all those horrors again.’ For the second time he had to renounce his dream. He decided to retrace the 600 miles to Kulja and re-form the expedition for a fresh start.
Zaman Bek had now rejoined him from Kurla, bringing sugar, apricots and raisins, two skins from poisoned tigers—perhaps those Przhevalsky had baited—and, most important, news. The Russian mission to Yakub Bey had successfully negotiated its border concessions and had left for Kokand, abandoning Yakub Bey to his fate. From Europe came news of war with Turkey, a war which promised to anger half the world with Russia’s territorial gains in the Balkans. Gathering up his specimens—which included a wild camel taken from its mother’s womb—and making a final survey of Lob Nor by boat, Przhevalsky handed his spent brass cartridges to the natives and left with Zaman Bek for Kurla.
April passed in a forced march up the Tarim. Przhevalsky was irritated by Zaman Bek’s attentions and opinions, and his proximity when dust storms forced them to share a ger. The expedition now took bearings openly, certain that Yakub Bey would be too preoccupied with the Chinese to care about Russian reconnaissance. As they neared Kurla, they were intercepted by a messenger from Kuropatkin bringing last years’ newspapers. Przhevalsky was disappointed to read that no world war had developed. War, he felt, would revitalize a stagnant world and rouse a depressed spirit. He complained in his diary of the ‘lack of moral fibre and energy which characterizes all the actions of diplomacy and governments today … I was convinced that war was inevitable … the mountain has given birth to a mouse.’ His irritability was a symptom of the onset of the skin disease that was to torment him over the next year. Oskar, the dog, began to tire on the waterless stretches: ‘I even have difficulty getting the choice of dog right for an expedition,’ grumbled Przhevalsky.
At Kurla they were housed away from the town, as before. After five days, ho
wever, Yakub Bey called for Przhevalsky, who made him a present of three modern carbines. The meeting was more pleasant than he expected and Yakub Bey’s officers were too worried by their predicament to be interested in extracting more presents. Yakub Bey provided another ten camels to see the expedition off and asked Przhevalsky to remind the government in Petersburg of his existence. ‘Yakub Bey,’ wrote Przhevalsky to his brother Vladimir, ‘is the same shit as all feckless Asiatics. The Kashgarian empire isn’t worth a penny.’ With a gift of three gold rings, one for Przhevalsky, one for his mother and one for Eklon, the party left Yakub Bey’s court.
Zaman Bek escorted the expedition northwards. Only after four days did he agree to turn back; Przhevalsky had made him a gift of his book, Mongolia and the Country of the Tanguts, and of his old carbine, and he wrote an equivocal note, ‘we met with all sorts of cooperation’, which might satisfy both Yakub Bey and Przhevalsky’s sense of honour. Then he shook the dust of Kashgaria from his feet and started to climb the Yuldus range.
Throughout June, one by one, the camels died. They ate poisonous plants, were attacked by gnats or gave in to the heat. Much baggage had to be jettisoned, and Przhevalsky and Eklon had to walk and transfer loads to their horses. By 8/20 June only ten camels were still alive; a Cossack had to gallop ahead to Kulja for new animals, while messages were sent to the Turghud refugees in the mountains asking them to hire out oxen to the expedition.
There were no oxen to be had, but parties of ragged, starving Turghud begged to be allowed to follow the expedition out of Kashgaria. They were killed outright whenever the Uighur Turks saw them; the Tungans, beggared by Yakub Bey, were reduced to preying on the Turghud. Przhevalsky could not refuse to shelter and feed them when the unassuming, stolid Dondok Irinchinov interceded for his fellow Mongols. Short not just of food but of pack animals, the expedition could only cover half its usual daily distance, so that the Turghud were still in danger of pursuit. On 9/21 May, Przhevalsky’s name-day, it was cold and wet; nine men and all the dogs slept in one tent for warmth. They celebrated with their last bottle of brandy and the last pot of jam that Eklon had hidden against such a day. A few days later the last of the flour was eaten and the expedition and refugees had to exist on the gazelles which the Cossacks shot. Another twenty-one Turghud, mainly old men and women with babies, joined the party, but as they were leaving Kashgaria, at the Khaidu River, most of the Turghud decided to hurry on ahead. No sooner had they left than shots rang out; seven of them were killed by Uighurs. The rest stayed with Przhevalsky, swimming the rivers with the camels, somehow surviving on tea and meat, wrapped in old clothes and pieces of felt scrounged from the expedition, and despite the intense wet cold of the snow-covered upper Yuldus, glad to be alive. In one well, from which they had drunk, Przhevalsky spotted the corpse of a young Turghud woman.
As they approached Kulja, the Cossack returned with dzamba (roast barley meal) and butter; the local Mongols hired out a few oxen to relieve the camels of their heavy loads. But there was little fuel to make life bearable at night and Przhevalsky took to burning spade handles to keep warm. A little later Tokhta-akhun rejoined them, bringing more monpansier, brandy and a Swiss cheese. Coming down into the Ili Valley, the weather was warmer and, despite his haste, Przhevalsky at last began to find flora worth collecting. In mid-July, plagued by gnats and mosquitoes, the expedition was back in Kulja. Przhevalsky was overjoyed to hear of Russia’s victories over Turkey. He telegraphed the War Ministry, asking whether he might join the army at the front, while in his diary he wondered if the course of his expedition towards British India might not be militarily just as important. ‘Where shall I have to go? To the Danube or to the Brahmaputra?’
But Milyutin and his New Army had enough officers to fight the Turks; he ordered Przhevalsky to continue his explorations. Even before arriving at Kulja, Przhevalsky had begun to re-form the expedition. All the Cossacks except Dondok Irinchinov, Panfil Chebayev and a Buryat called Garmayev had been sent ahead; Przhevalsky took on a Turghud as guide and interpreter; all of them were on probation for the next stage. Meanwhile, his predictions were coming true. Less than a month after Przhevalsky left Kurla, Yakub Bey was dead. Kuropatkin reported: ‘On 16/28 May 1877 at 5 p.m. the Badaulet was severely vexed by his secretary, Hamal, and beat him to death with a rifle butt for carelessly handling certain assignments. Then Yakub Bey attacked and started hitting his treasurer, Sabir-akhun. Then he had a stroke and lost consciousness and speech. The Badaulet remained in this state and died on 17/29 May at 2 p.m.’ Yakub Bey’s eldest son drew a revolver over the coffin and shot his brother dead. The Kashgarian empire was in ruins. The Chinese quickly took Kara Shahr and Russia’s policies were forestalled.
Before the fatal news reached Kulja, Przhevalsky wrote a report for the General Staff, ‘On the Present State of Eastern Turkestan.’ He gave a searching analysis of Yakub Bey’s weaknesses, predicting the imminent collapse of Kashgaria. His main recommendation was that the Russian authorities should profit from the disorder by bringing the Russian border south from the Ili Valley and annexing the southern Tien Shan and Yuldus ‘with their excellent grazing on which many thousands of Kalmyks can be settled, who are in any case more inclined towards us than to the fanatical Moslems’. But the recommendations came too late. The victorious Chinese were not going to let Russia benefit from Kashgaria’s ruin.
Przhevalsky had brought back to Kulja not just scientific collections and political intelligence, but sickness. Psychological tension, months of unwashed intimacy, salt dust and insect bites had weakened everyone in the expedition. Przhevalsky and Eklon found themselves suffering from an excruciating itch which the Kulja doctor diagnosed as pruritis scrofi. Przhevalsky’s testicles itched, his head ached and nothing in Kulja’s meagre dispensary brought relief. Eklon developed a serious fever. Przhevalsky tried to forget he was ill, though he could hardly sleep. He wrote up his journey and in a matter of weeks he finished the most laconic of all his accounts, From Kulja across the Tien Shan and to Lob Nor, and began, headaches, itch and diarrhoea notwithstanding, to make a fair copy for publication in the Imperial Geographical Society’s communications.
He went on preparing for a new departure for Lhasa. He chose twenty-four apparently superb camels from the animals that the local Kirghiz offered. He and Eklon, tears rolling down their cheeks, gave Oskar, the dog that tired too easily, to a Major Gerasimov. Cossacks and soldiers were carefully chosen. Some of the scientific collections were sent to the Academy of Sciences, some were left in the care of the prefect of Kulja. Przhevalsky was buoyant; he had just been promoted to full colonel. But he had more worries. A letter came from Yelena, congratulating him on his promotion, but full of sadness:
You generals all ought to stay in one place. Probably this is your last expedition. Don’t you torture yourself and me as well. What more do you want? As it is, the memory of you, your being deprived of all life’s comforts have made my life a misery and really I’ve aged during this time by ten years and I shan’t see you for another two years!
Now your uncle Pavel Alekseyevich died on 26 December. He had a short illness and Mikhail Aleksandrovich [Pyltsov] gave him a good funeral; of course afterwards Vladimir took on all the burial expenses … The last months of his life he was quite unconscious, couldn’t recognize anyone and it was a good thing that he didn’t drag on but just died peacefully. But everyone was drunk at the funeral, the people who all dropped in got through ten gallons of vodka in one day …
Przhevalsky set aside illness and worries and put his mind to the journey to Lhasa. This time he would have to move through Chinese-held territory and skirt round the battles and massacres in Kashgaria by describing a great arc through Dzungaria, the oases of Hami and An-hsi to Tsaidam.
The expedition set off on its ‘second stage’ on 28 August/9 September 1877, with three horses, twenty-four camels, two-and-a-half tons of baggage, thirty-three firearms, 7,200 rounds of ammunition, twenty-five bottles of brandy, a hundredweight of
tea, and about seventy pounds of Turkish delight, monpansier and marmalade. As well as his nucleus of eight men, Przhevalsky had now taken on a Chinese-speaking Moslem, Abdul Basid Yusupov, who was disarmingly stupid, with ‘a head like a pumpkin’, as Przhevalsky put it, and a guide, a reformed Kirghiz horse-thief, Mirzash. Both were engaging characters, but they had serious drawbacks. Abdul’s loyalty to Przhevalsky made him offensively bumptious when speaking with Chinese officials; Mirzash led the expedition on even more of a detour than was already necessary to avoid Chinese soldiers and convict gangs, in order to call on his relatives on the Borotala River. The Cossacks soon nicknamed Mirzash the ‘fat-faced kumys-shitter’ for his virtuosity in relieving himself without dismounting and his passion for fermented mare’s milk (kumys). Przhevalsky thrashed Mirzash on three occasions for deceit and for nearly missing a well; but he was secretly fond of this 56-year-old rogue with a record of 1,000 stolen horses and a deep axe-scar on his forehead to prove it.
In overpowering heat they set off down the Ili Valley, through the Tungans’ orchards and gardens, before climbing the Tien Shan and moving north-east, parallel to the Russian border. Two more local guides were taken on and then dismissed. Mirzash took the lead, and as they descended to the Borotala, one of the expedition’s horses was stolen by local Kirghiz; Przhevalsky ordered his Cossacks to confiscate another horse from the first Kirghiz settlement. The heat drove men and animals desperate with thirst; at nightfall the horses would drink from ladles and the small flock of sheep that they drove with them drank from hand-held bowls. The heat activated Przhevalsky’s pruritus; his whole body itched and he longed for the first autumn frosts to cool it. Scorpions invaded the tent, and all the gaps had to be plugged with felt.
The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia Page 12
