Then there were sand dunes near the track — big soft slopes and bright piles; but the snowy peaks in the distance still remained. I had not realized that there was anything so strange as this on this planet.
I was eating dinner in the empty dining car at about eight that night when we came to Jiayuguan. What I saw out the window is printed on my mind: in the summer dusk of the Gobi Desert, a Chinese town lay glowing in the sand, and rising above it, ten stories high, was the last gate in the Great Wall, the Jia Yu Watchtower — a fortress-like structure with pagoda roofs; and the train slowed at the Wall’s end, a crumbled pile of mud bricks and ruined turrets that the wind had simplified and sucked smooth. In the fading light of day, there was this ghostly remainder of the Great Wall, and what looked like the last town in China. The Wall went straggling west, but it was so small and destroyed it looked like little more than an idea or a suggestion — the remnants of a great scheme. But my excitement also came from seeing the red paint on the gate, and the yellow roof, and the thought that this train was passing beyond it into the unknown. The sun slanted on the gray hills and the desert and blue bushes. Most of what I saw was through the blurring haze of the day’s dust, and the intimation at sunset was that I would fall off the edge of the world as soon as it got dark.
Lost Cities
“THE DESERT WHICH LIES BETWEEN ANSI AND HAMI IS A howling wilderness, and the first thing which strikes the wayfarer is the dismalness of its uniform, black, pebble-strewn surface.” That was Mildred Cable speaking. And reading her book reminded me that I was missing one of the glories of this region by not visiting the caves at Dunhuang — Buddhas, frescoes, holy grottoes; the sacred city in the sands. But I intended to go one better, by visiting the lost city of Gaocheng (Karakhoja) whenever this train got to Turfan.
I had gone to bed in a strange late twilight amid a rugged landscape, and I woke, slowly jogging in the train, to a flat region of sand and stones. Farther off were large humpy sand dunes, which had the appearance of having softly flowed and blown there, because there was nothing like them nearby. The dunes were like simple gigantic animals that went blobbing along through the desert, smothering whatever they encountered.
Soon a patch of green appeared — an oasis. Once there was merely a road linking the oases — but “once” meant only thirty years ago. Before then it was a rough road, what remained of the Silk Route. But these oases were not metaphors for a few trees and a stagnant pool. They were large towns, well watered from underground irrigation canals, and grapes and melons were grown in great profusion. Later in the day the train stopped at Hami. The Hami melon is famous all over China for its sweet taste and its fragrance; and Hami had been no insignificant place, although now it was what remained of the fruit-growing communes of the fifties and sixties. It had known great days, and had had a khan until this century. It had been overrun by Mongols, by Uighurs, by Tibetans and Dzungars. It had been repeatedly reoccupied by the Chinese since the year A.D. 73, during the Later Han Dynasty, and had been a Chinese city from 1698 onward. Nothing of this remained. What had not been damaged in the Muslim Rebellion of 1863–73 had been flattened in the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese had a facility for literally defacing a city — taking all its characteristic features away, robbing it of its uniqueness, cutting its nose off. Now all Hami was known for was its pig iron.
The peaks beyond Hami and farther up the line had patches of snow on their ridges that lay like saddle blankets, squarish and flat. But down here in the train and on the desert it was very hot — over one hundred degrees in the train and hotter outside. The sun burned down on the sand and stones. There were a few gullies, and in the oldest and deepest ones, which were sheltered, perhaps a dead wutong tree, and here and there clumps of camel thorn, the only identifiable weed, apart from the spikes of gray lichens. We were heading toward a dusty range of hills that was surmounted by a blue range of mountains, and rising up beyond were more mountains, which were bright with snow patches and ice slides — long streaks that might have been glaciers.
They were the first sight I had of the Bogda Shan, the Mountains of God. They were very rugged and very high, but their snow was the only lively feature of this place. Beneath those mountains there was nothing but desert, “the howling wilderness,” which this afternoon was too bright to stare at. Rainfall is unknown here, and most of those mountains seemed little more than a vast, poisoned massif — a lifeless pack of rock. This is the dead center of Asia.
In this oddly lighted world of snow and sand, the stone mountains reddened and rushed up to the train. In the distance was a green basin, five hundred feet below sea level, the lowest place in China, and one of the hottest. Another oasis, the town of Turfan. Round about there was nothing else but a hundred miles of blackish gravel, and Turfan itself was twenty miles from the station. I got off the train here.
TURFAN (“ONE OF THE HOTTEST PLACES ON THE FACE OF THE earth”) was an extremely popular oasis about four hundred years ago. Before then it had been a desert town overrun by successive waves of nomads, Chinese, Tibetans, Uighurs, and Mongols. The Silk Road established it as a great oasis and bazaar, but after that — from about the sixteenth century — it was all downhill. And after it was finally left alone by the warlords and the Manchus, new marauders appeared in the shape of enterprising archaeologists, and the few frescoes and statues that remained after more than two thousand years of continuous civilization were snatched and carried away to places like Tokyo, Berlin, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Such a place seemed to me unmissable. The station was at the edge of the depression. All I could see were telephone poles in the stony desert, and the huge purply-red range called The Flaming Mountains. The town of Turfan did not reveal itself until I was almost on top of it, and even then it seemed less like a Chinese town than a Middle Eastern one — it was straight out of the Bible, with donkeys and grape arbors and mosques, and people who looked Lebanese, with brown faces and gray eyes.
The desert was almost unbelievably horrible-looking — bouldery and black, without a single green thing in it. And it seemed as though if you walked on those stones you would cut your feet. In some spots it looked like an immensity of coal ashes, with scatterings of clinkers and scorched stones. In other places it was dust, with rounded mounds piled here and there. The mounds I discovered were part of the irrigation system called the karez, a network of underground canals and boreholes that had been used successfully since the Western Han Dynasty, about two thousand years ago. There were also parts of this desert surrounding Turfan that had an undersea look, as of an ocean floor after the tide went out for good. Everyone called it the gobi: the waterless place. Rainfall is unknown in Turfan.
In this shallow green valley in the desert, in which all the water came from underground, there were no Chinese high-rises, and most of the houses were small and square. There were grape arbors suspended over most of the streets — for the shade and also for the prettiness of them. This valley is the chief source of Chinese grapes — there is even a winery in Turfan — and thirty varieties of melon grow in the area. That intensifies the relief on having come from one of the wildest deserts in the world. Turfan is the opposite of everything that lies around it, with its water and its shade and its fresh fruit.
In Turfan I bought the local raisins made from white grapes — the best in China — and apricots. And I sat in my room, eating that stuff and drinking my Dragon Well green tea and writing my notes, until Fang and the driver had had their fill of gruel, and then we set off down the dusty roads.