by Joyce Morgan
Now, six years on and under another full moon, he was back in the desert whose terrifying beauty haunted him. He camped amid the rolling dunes beside a Muslim shrine inhabited by thousands of sacred pigeons to whom grateful travelers made offerings. The shrine was near what Stein called “my kingdom” of Khotan, once the center of a Buddhist civilization. He was intrigued by its legend. Locals said the birds were the descendants of a pair of doves that had sprung from the heart of a Muslim martyr killed as his army battled Khotan’s Buddhist infidels. But to Stein, the tale recalled a similar, though much older legend encountered by Xuanzang as he journeyed through the kingdom. In this version, the sacred animals weren’t birds but rats—giant rodents the size of hedgehogs with hair of gold and silver—and they had saved Khotan’s Buddhist king from invading Huns by chewing through the enemy’s leather armor and harnesses in the night. Stein suspected that with the spread of Islam through the region, the Buddhist rats had evolved into Muslim birds. The legend had been appropriated rather than eliminated. It was the sort of cultural shape-shifting that appealed to Stein. It also suggested that beneath the Muslim surface were the remains of an earlier Buddhist mythology.
Whatever the basis of the story, some help for the journey ahead wouldn’t go astray. Stein’s men had brought along extra grain for the pigeons and they insisted he, too, pay homage. While the caravan was getting ready before dawn, Stein entered the wooden sheds where the birds were nesting. Carefully avoiding crushing any eggs, he scattered grain for the fluttering birds. His offerings would be richly rewarded.
Stein’s sights were set on two places far across the desert. He wanted to find the mysterious settlement of Loulan that Sven Hedin had discovered in 1899. Amid the ruined buildings of the ancient Chinese garrison town, Hedin had uncovered fragments of early paper, wooden documents, and Buddhist images. One of these, a fragment made between AD 150 and 200, was then the world’s oldest known piece of paper and the earliest example of handwriting on paper. Hedin had observed that the door to one house stood open just as it had when it was abandoned 1,500 years earlier.
Beyond Loulan was Dunhuang and the painted caves, but all of these would have to wait for winter. Only then would it be safe to cross that part of the desert, and it would require a resourceful method to overcome the lack of water. Stein’s more immediate goal was to travel southeast from Kashgar to the Kunlun Shan, the vast mountain range on the northern border of the Tibetan plateau. There he would undertake surveying work before returning to the desert in the cooler weather. Mapping in this region was politically sensitive and dangerous. Some servants of the Raj went to extraordinary lengths to carry out their clandestine activities. Several Indian surveyors disguised themselves as Tibetan pilgrims and carried specially adapted prayer wheels and Buddhist rosary beads. The number of beads was reduced from the traditional 108 to 100 so the surveyors could easily count their steps. They recorded their tally on tiny paper scrolls which they hid inside the hollow prayer wheels, some of which also contained compasses. James Bond’s Q could hardly have developed a more ingenious solution.
Stein never adopted such a disguise himself. He left behind his camels and some of his men and headed into the Kunlun Mountains in August 1906. With its bluebells and edelweiss the alpine landscape was a verdant relief after the barren desert and recalled his beloved Kashmir. Surrounded by snow-capped peaks, he found an idyllic camp where he could put the final touches to his book about his first expedition. As he continued through the mountains, Stein was eager to solve a mystery more than forty years old. It concerned the difficult and long-abandoned route by which British surveyor William Johnson crossed from Leh to Khotan in 1865. Stein had been puzzled by discrepancies between Johnson’s hand-drawn sketch and the topography of the mountains. Despite the existence of the sketch, local hill men denied knowledge of such a path. Stein suspected such denials stemmed from a fear that rediscovery would expose the inhabitants to unwanted intruders. He had tried to determine the route during his first expedition without success, and once again he was unable to do so.
Nonetheless, after nearly a month amid mountain rivers, glaciers, rugged gorges and alpine valleys, he was in good spirits as he returned to the lower ground of Khotan, where early autumn hues colored the oasis’s poplars. He camped, as he had in 1900, in the garden of his prosperous friend Akhun Beg. But the elderly man had left two days earlier on a pilgrimage to Mecca, from which Stein and the landowner’s family feared he might not return. Khotan’s new Chinese amban organized a lavish garden party in Stein’s honor. He was led in procession along an avenue of shady vines in the old garden palace known as Narbagh to a pavilion filled with red felt rugs and carpets. The young handyman, Naik Ram Singh, was an imposing presence in his scarlet and blue army uniform and carefully wound turban. The guests, including Chinese officials and Muslim leaders, feasted for hours, although on what Stein did not say. He admitted only that it was a challenge to his European digestion and that he was glad when the rice arrived—a signal of the feast’s end. But he enjoyed the musicians who performed throughout on stringed instruments, tambourines and flutes. Khotan’s reputation for musicianship was well justified, he felt. “After an event like that Wagner is hardly likely to have any charms for you,” a friend later commented to Stein.
But the celebratory mood was short-lived. He returned to the Buddhist stupa of Rawak, where on his 1900 expedition he had found and reburied fragile statues. He was devastated to discover that in the intervening years treasure hunters had destroyed the figures in their search for hidden jade. “My care in burying these again under the sand, just as I had found them, had proved in vain,” he wrote. “All that survives now, I fear, are my photographs.” That was not the only loss Stein faced. Of the eight camels he had bought at great expense in Kashgar, five were dead soon after Stein rejoined his caravan to travel east. The cause was a mystery. They had been well tended in Stein’s absence by his trusted camel man Hassan Akhun, who was distraught at their loss. It was a major setback, and they would have to be replaced. This would dent his already tight budget, although the cost was not the only reason for his anguish. He prided himself on the fact that, unlike Hedin, he lost few animals and genuinely cared about their welfare. Finding replacements would be difficult more than 400 miles from the bustling crossroads of Kashgar. For two days the camel owners of Keriya produced a dispiriting array of dubious beasts they hoped to offload. Finally, seven strong camels were secured with the aid of Hassan Akhun’s knowledge and his sharp tongue. These would not only survive but more than earn their keep.
The loss of his camels was compounded by more bad news. Macartney reported that Pelliot had just arrived in Kashgar. Stein was convinced the Frenchman would aim for Lop Nor and Dunhuang. “There is thus every reason to push on eastwards with as little delay as the work en route allows. [Pelliot] intends to explore the Kucha caves and other places on the northern route, and this gives me a fair chance, I think, for arriving in time. But how glad I should have been if all this hustle could have been spared to me by my start as originally intended!” he wrote to Allen.
Stein spent the autumn months of 1906 digging at desert sites as he made his way east. The siren call of the desert drew him on.
The expanse of yellow dunes lay before me, with nothing to break their wavy monotony but the bleached trunks of trees or the rows of splintered posts marking houses which rose here and there above the sand crests. The feeling of being in an open sea was ever present, and more than once those remains seen from a distance suggested the picture of a wreck reduced to the mere ribs of its timber.
After a couple of months revisiting some of the sites from his first expedition, the temperature dropped, and in December his caravan pulled into Charklik. The remote oasis of about 500 homesteads was inhabited mostly by semi-nomadic herders and fishermen known as Lopliks. This was new terrain for Stein. Charklik was the most easterly oasis on the southern Silk Road, and from here he
launched his winter search for Hedin’s Loulan. The ancient garrison lay in the fearsome Lop Desert at the eastern extreme of the Taklamakan. Lop is not a place of rolling sand dunes but hard clay terraces, salt marshes and the massive, moving Lop Nor salt lake. (In recent decades, China has tested its nuclear weapons in this desolate region.)
Stein hired extra camels and donkeys for what lay ahead. “All Charklik is being ransacked for the supplies,” he wrote. He needed thirty-five laborers, but the locals were understandably reluctant to head off on a long journey into a waterless desert in the middle of winter, no matter how much they were to be paid. Their relatives feared it was a death sentence. However, Stein had a stroke of good luck when two hunters who had accompanied Sven Hedin turned up from the neighboring hamlet of Abdal.
Wiry Old Mullah had spent his life chasing wild camels and selling their meat. Aged nearly sixty and with a high-pitched voice, he may have looked and sounded unpromising, but he knew the desert like the back of his wrinkled hands. He had even rediscovered a long-forgotten caravan route from Abdal to Dunhuang—a route Stein was keen to eventually follow. The younger man, burly Tokhta Akhun, was about thirty-five and arrived with an intriguing scrap of old paper. It was written in Tibetan and he had found it in the desert not far away at a place known as Miran. Stein decided it just might be worth a look. It would not be the last time he would follow up a tip with extraordinary results.
Cries of yol bolsun—“may there be a way”—from the laborers’ anxious relatives accompanied the party as they left Charklik on December 6. Despite the promise of fresh terrain, Stein could not shed his familiar apprehensions. “I shall make a depot at Abdal, the easternmost inhabited place, so as to be ready for the rush to [Dunhuang] if the appearance of Pelliot’s party should force me to hurry on. In this way I hope to secure the advantage of a nearer base & quicker start if fate wills that we should meet at the ruins.”
Stein pulled into Abdal, a wretched village of gouty octogenarians, where he established his base beside the Tarim River. There he left everything not needed in his search for Loulan. He assigned one of his most reliable men, Tila Bai, to guard the finds collected so far and a large quantity of uncoined silver he would need when journeying in China, where the coins of Turkestan were not accepted. Reluctantly, he left Chiang at Abdal too. Stein feared his secretary would not cope with long tramps on foot and he could not spare him an extra camel. Chiang would winter in what passed for comparative comfort: the best reed hut in the cheerless hamlet.
Meanwhile, Stein prepared his caravan for the hunt. The camels were each given seven buckets of water—it would have to last them several weeks. There would be no water ahead other than what could be carried as blocks of ice. Working until midnight under the light of giant bonfires, the men hacked ice from a frozen freshwater lagoon and stored the chunks in woolen bags. Each camel was loaded with more than 400 pounds of ice. They could expect no fodder save some foul-smelling rapeseed oil, “camel’s tea” as Hassan Akhun called it. Thirty donkeys were loaded with smaller amounts of ice. The donkeys were used in relay, traveling two days beyond the furthest ice supply to deposit their loads and return for more. It was a hugely complicated arrangement and required military precision. However, it would enable Stein and his men to stay longer in the desert than had Hedin.
The route back had to be marked with the remains of bleached, dead trees and blocks of clay since the caravan would leave few footprints in the hard ground. Even those they did leave would be obliterated by the first gale in the windswept region. The terrain consisted of rocky outcrops known as yardangs. Separated by parallel trenches, the sculpted forms ran northeast to southwest. The ground was so hard that even knocking in iron tent pegs was difficult. Travel was slow going and the heavily laden camels could cover only a mile and a half an hour. Their feet cracked on the salt-encrusted ground. At night Stein could hear the footsore beasts bellow as Hassan Akhun and his helpers resoled the camels by the painful local method: sewing ox hide onto their foot pads. It took half a dozen men to hold down each camel and the process took hours. Even Dash grew footsore. But the wiry fox terrier at least found a warm nightly refuge curled up in Stein’s tent under camelhair blankets.
Seven days passed without a sign of Loulan. To raise flagging spirits, Stein promised a reward of silver to the first man to sight a ruin. The party had covered about eight miles on a particularly bitter day when one of his keen-eyed men spotted the distant knob of a ruined stupa on the horizon. Stein had at last found what he was looking for. He had used Hedin’s map to guide him to Loulan, and it had proved remarkably accurate.
The dispirited Charklik laborers were buoyed and so too was Hassan Akhun, who instantly forgot his own dejection. In his bright red cloak and purple high-peaked cap, he stood on top of a yardang to address the weary laborers. An amused Stein watched as the camel handler stood with his arms outstretched like an ancient prophet. “Had he not always tried to drum it into their thick heads that under the guidance of his Sahib, who could fathom all hidden places of the dreaded Taklamakan with ‘his paper and Mecca-pointer,’ i.e. map and compass, all things were bound to come right?”
Despite the quick-witted camel man’s fiery temper and bouts of petulance—“a handful when things are easy, & a man of resource when given a hard task”—perhaps Stein felt more than ever that the mercurial camel man was not driven by money alone. “I felt the instinctive assurance that Hassan Akhun’s was the only human soul with me for whom this desert adventure had a real attraction,” Stein wrote. He put it more bluntly in a letter to his friend Percy Allen. “One longs for helpers really interested in the work and not mainly longing for fleshpots.”
He was overjoyed to find no trace of the Germans or French at Loulan. Nor were there any signs of local treasure hunters. Hedin, who had only five men and six days in which to work, had left plenty for Stein to uncover in the next eleven days.
Loulan was once on the edge of the Lop Nor lake, but the lake had long since shifted course and the town was abandoned in the fourth century. The town had once helped protect trade along the ancient Silk Road, and one of the first items Stein uncovered was a roll of brittle yellow silk. The men dug among ruined dwellings and in ancient rubbish dumps while winds gusting up to fifty miles an hour scattered filth in their faces. “The odours were still pungent, with the icy northeast wind driving fine particles impregnated with ammonia into one’s throat and nose.”
He uncovered not gold and jewels but humble relics of everyday life: beads, coins, fragments of carpet, an embroidered slipper, and military records. He found woodcarvings and writing on paper and wood, including an ancient script used in Gandhara, known as Kharosthi. Here, on China’s edge, was evidence of the influence of far-off Gandhara. He also found the first fragment of the lost language of Sogdian, the ancient tongue widely spoken along the Silk Road.
His dig at Loulan was punctuated by two unusual events on consecutive days. The first was his discovery of a “relic” left by the site’s only other recent Western visitor—a metal tape measure that Hedin had dropped in 1901. Stein returned it to the Swede at a Royal Geographic Society dinner in London two years later. The well-traveled metal tape measure remains in the society’s collection.
The next day, as dusk fell on what Stein expected would be a cold, lonely Christmas Eve, a commotion erupted among his men. He looked up to see that his weary dak runner, Turdi, had trudged into camp with a huge bag of letters. Stein could hardly have been more astonished if Santa Claus had arrived pulled by a team of reindeer. Stein had last seen Turdi six weeks earlier on November 15, when he had dispatched him to Khotan with his mail. Turdi had reached the oasis twelve days later. There he had been given a pony and a fur coat for the long journey back east, together with a big bag of mail sent by Macartney in Kashgar. Meanwhile, Stein had moved more than 500 miles farther east.
Turdi had reached Abdal but could not find anyone there who k
new which direction Stein had gone. So determined, foolhardy Turdi had abandoned his pony and headed on foot into the desert carrying his heavy mail bag. He followed Stein’s tracks as best he could but ran out of ice five days later. The thirsty dak runner pressed on, not knowing how far ahead Stein had traveled. He simply hoped the chances of finding Stein—somewhere ahead, sometime soon—were greater than the certainty of a slow death in the waterless waste if he turned back. Turdi’s terrible gamble paid off. When he staggered toward Stein on the sixth day, Turdi’s demand was not for water but for Stein to check that the seals were intact—and hence his own integrity—on the mail bags he had carried from Khotan. How Turdi had covered an astonishing 1,200 miles in thirty-nine days, an average of thirty miles a day, was a mystery.
Stein devoured the letters and although their news was four months old it helped dissolve his sense of isolation. Wrapped in his rugs and furs, he sat in his tent reading and replying to his letters by candlelight late into the bitter night. To Allen he wrote: “The ink is beginning to freeze in my fountain pen, though I have sacrificed an extra cake of compressed fuel to keep up the temperatures in the tent for this long chat with you.”
If there were as many Ganges Rivers as the number of grains of sand in the Ganges, would you say that the number of grains of sand in all those Ganges Rivers is very many?
—VERSE 11, THE DIAMOND SUTRA
5
The Angels’ Sanctuary
New Year’s Day dawned brightly and the wind dropped as Stein headed away from Loulan and southwest toward the Tarim River. The terrain changed from clay terraces to sand dunes that grew in height as he continued. Fuel was scarce. Just a few armfuls had been gathered by the time his party halted for the evening. There was enough to make tea and cook a meal, but too little to sustain a warming fire. That night was the coldest of the winter and the temperature fell to minus sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. It was a cheerless start to what would become the greatest year of Stein’s life, though one that would cost him dearly.
