October 10. Have wended my way to the settlement of Semipalatinsk on the Irtysh River, the ‘Seven-Chambered City’, so named from a long-gone monastery with seven buildings. We have left Russia’s silver birch forests and the Ural mountains well behind, along with Russia’s influence. For the foreseeable future, large stretches of my journey must be undertaken on foot, eastward into the eye of the rising sun, only the baggage carried by horse and mule. The pretty 10-rouble gold coins with Tsar Nicholas II on one side and the double headed eagle of the old Byzantine Empire on the other are now a rarity. My pocketful of Mexican dollars is coming in useful.
I switched to a horse-drawn tarantass to reach the frontier at Bakhty and on through Urumchio to Chinese Turkestan. In such fashion I arrived at Turfan, the northern arm of the Silk Road. The heat in summer rises to 130° Fahrenheit, yet the temperature in winter is so bitter that vehicles can only be started by lighting fires under the engine sump, a risky procedure but regarded as routine.
In their heyday, the Silk Roads were famous thoroughfares, the numerous oasis-villages producing wines, melons and grapes which, side by side with religions, ideas, technologies and languages, moved to and fro between the Imperial Court at Ch’ang-an and the Ottoman and European empires. A German archaeologist travelling with me said that by the 8th Century Hindus, Jews, Nestorians, Manichaeans, Zoroastrians lived in great cities along the routes. They traded in cosmetics, rare plants, falcons, parrots, the occasional lion, and that marvel, the ostrich, first known as ‘great sparrows’, latterly ‘camel birds’.
Now the earthquake-scarred hills are destitute of all life, the cities gone.
To the north lies the snow-capped Bogdo-Ola, the ‘Mountain of God’, higher than anything in Europe. The division between arid desert and fertile land is as definite as that between shore and ocean. The first of the many garrisons I plan to inspect is only a matter of days ahead. The old warhorse in me sniffs the air and paws the ground. My mission can soon commence.
3am. The extremes of temperature have no effect on the repulsive insect life. In addition to mosquitoes, sand flies, scorpions, fleas and lice there are two particularly unpleasant kinds of spider. One is the jumping kind with a body the size of a pullet’s egg. Its jaws produce a crunching sound. The other is smaller, black and hairy, and lives in a hole in the ground. These are to be avoided. Their bite, if not lethal, is extremely dangerous. At night, I am surrounded by huge Turfan cockroaches. Their big eyes stare down at you, their long feelers try to attack your eyes. Finding such a creature sitting on my nose on awaking is enough to make any man vomit uncontrollably.
October 19. I am now the sole European in a small party camped the night by a large smugglers’ caravan of some forty transports laden with coral. The caravan is heading in the opposite direction to us, back, towards Irkeshtam and the Russian border. Coral is highly dutiable. We watched as the ponies were forced to swallow the coral. Once through the customs the donkeymen will delve through the ponies’ droppings to regain the smuggled lumps and beads.
October 21. Our Kirghiz horses are superbly sure-footed. Even on ice they keep their feet. They climb over boulders like mountain goats, or go unhesitatingly down steep paths cut like staircases. In this part of the world the distance from one point to another on the outward journey may be quite different from a return journey over exactly the same path. I came across this interesting fact on hiring mules and coolies for a diversion from an overnight encampment to an isolated fort. The charge levied for the one mile outward journey was tripled for the return journey on exactly the same track. With a patronising look the Chinaman explained the outward journey was downhill and therefore easy, but the same journey back was up a steep gradient and not at all easy. On level ground the distance of one statute mile equals just short of 3 ‘li’. By contrast, up very steep roads the same statute mile is called 15 li, and charged accordingly. A stretch down a river like the Yangtze might cost 90 li one way and the return journey up-stream a third more.
Late this afternoon our small and disparate band of travellers reached the end of a long valley. Leeches are plentiful on the lower slopes. Anticipating the arrival of monied ‘feranghis’ the local people readied several calico tents for us in the long, wet grass. They were armed with repeating rifles to defend their paying guests. We were supplied with various kinds of game hunted with falcons, mainly beautiful little red-legged partridges which run across the hillsides, and a large bird like Scotland’s capercailzie. The fare provided welcome relief from days of scraggy chickens or boiled mutton without salt, or the tins of sausages and soups brought from London.
October 23. At sun-up I joined a train crossing rough territory for about 50 miles in the right direction. A short way into the journey it pulled into a small station to replenish water and coal. Word got out among the two or three Europeans aboard that we would be there long enough to stretch our legs.
I stepped on to the platform and before long a most amusing sight presented itself. Coming at a lick down the dusty road towards the station entrance was a wheelbarrow covered with yellow silk, pushed by a panting porter and preceded at a trot by several coolies waving yellow banners. Leaning out of the wheelbarrow at a dangerous angle was an old man adorned with the longest white beard imaginable, so long it was in danger of catching the legs of the banner-bearers and upending them.
The soothsayer’s flamboyant clothing was a curious mix of Manchu and Han attire, the flowing sleeves displaying the depredations of moths and their caterpillars which had eaten out some considerable patches. His head was shaved except for the long pigtail known as a queue. The eyeglasses clamped on the Chinaman’s pock-marked face were the thickest I have ever seen, slices of smoky quartz crystal polished until translucent. They completely enclosed his eyes, like Victorian railway glasses worn in open carriages to protect the eye from funnel smoke and sparks.
Two further coolies at the unusual transport’s sides held up a red woollen cloth umbrella in a cylindrical shape, like the half of a drum. A retainer brought up the rear, carrying his master’s water-tobacco pouch, a small hat and a clothes bag.
The porter brought the wheelbarrow and its cargo on to the platform at a run and dropped it thankfully, sweating heavily. Out stepped the theatrical fortune-teller. The banners were held up in a semi-circle behind him by the attendants. Around his waist was a silken belt with dragon and tiger hooks of a white stone from which were suspended a watch, a fan, an ornamental purse and a small knife. I was astonished to see he was afflicted with the hereditary condition known as thumb polydactyly, both hands having full duplication of the thumb including the first metacarpal. Many inhabitants, whether Manchu or native Chinese, have a deformation of some sort, a goitre, a strange squint, an unsightly dinge in the forehead, even one side of the face completely different from the other. His smile displayed another hereditary affliction: four or five of his teeth ran together in one piece, like a bone.
The spectacles made it difficult to place from which part of China his ancestry originated. The predominant Han have flat faces and noses. People originating in the north are often heavier and taller with broader shoulders, lighter skin, smaller eyes and more pointed noses than the people south of the Huai River–Qin Mountains line.
At my side, delighted with this display, was a fellow European, the same German archaeologist. He had good knowledge of Mandarin, and more to the point, Chinese logograms.