Part 1 (1/2)

JOURNEYS.

ON THE.

SILK ROAD.

A desert explorer, Buddha's secret library, and the unearthing of the world's oldest printed book.

JOYCE MORGAN & CONRADWALTERS.

Prologue.

For nearly a thousand years two attendants waited, sealed from the world in a hand-carved cave, while the sands of the great Gobi Desert crept forward. The figures, one with a topknot of black hair, the other robed in red, guarded the darkness with only a wooden staff for protection and a fan for comfort. Their cave was three paces wide by three paces deep, but they maintained a motionless vigil from the northern wall, where they merged with the room's arid earthy browns. Outside, the winds could howl, the sun could try to bake the sand into gla.s.s and the desert could encroach with each century until even a hidden doorway to the attendants' cave was buried. But inside, time had halted and everything was safe.

In front of the attendants were tens of thousands of ma.n.u.scripts, piled as high as a man could reach. There were charts of the heavens, rules for monks, and deeds recording the owners.h.i.+p of slaves sold long ago. There were banners that could be unfurled from the cliffs outside and paintings on silk of enlightened beings. But outnumbering all of those were sutras-the words of the Buddha himself-piled into the black air, unheard, awaiting rebirth into a new realm.

Most were copies made with brushes dipped in l.u.s.trous charcoal ink by hands unknown, in kingdoms forgotten. But one paper sutra held special significance. It could confer spiritual blessings as no other. Where the rest were laboriously copied by long-dead scribes, this had been created with a wooden block and reproduced at a rate once unimaginable. It was the oldest printed book in the cave-the Diamond Sutra-and although no one outside knew it yet, this dated scroll was the oldest of its kind anywhere. The sutra taught that life is illusory and as fleeting as a bubble in a stream. True to its message, all who once knew the printed scroll was inside the cave had long since turned to dust, yet the Diamond Sutra itself remained intact.

Many copies of the sutra had preceded this one. Its words had been carried by man and beast through the wispy clouds of mountain pa.s.ses, over the cracked earth of deserts, across the glacier-fed currents of surging rivers. In time this printed copy would cross the seas to reach lands unknown to its creators. One day it would even convey the Buddha's wisdom invisibly through the air.

While Christians fought the Crusades and Magellan circled the globe, while Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and Genghis Khan united nomadic tribes, while the Black Death consumed Europe and Galileo imagined the cosmos, while Joan of Arc answered the voices in her head and Michelangelo sculpted David, the two attendants stood in meditative silence. Then, at the cusp of a new century, sound returned to the Library Cave. It was 1900-the Year of the Rat-and a faint noise announced the painstaking sweeping of the sand outside the attendants' cave. Day by day, week by week, month by month, the level of the sand receded and the indistinct voices of laborers grew louder until their sc.r.a.pings could be heard against the hidden door. For every moment across a millennium, the eyes of the two attendants had been open in antic.i.p.ation. And, at last, a seam of light arrived.

1.

The Great Race.

An unforgiving wind blew clouds of dust and sand as if every grain were aimed at one tired man astride a weary pony. He urged his mount forward, determined to keep a promise. He had set out long before dawn, leaving behind his team of men and pack animals, knowing he would have to cover in one day ground that would typically take three. Traveling through the heat and glare of the Central Asian desert, he now looked on his vow-to arrive that day on the doorstep of friends in a distant oasis-as uncharacteristically rash. But for seventeen hours he pressed on across parched wastes of gravel and hard-baked earth.

As dusk approached, the sting of the day's heat eased, yet the failing light compounded his struggle to keep to the track amid the blinding sand. His destination of Kashgar could not be far away. But where? He was lost. He looked for someone-anyone-who could offer directions, but the locals knew better than to go into the desert at night during a howling wind storm. He found a farm worker in a dilapidated shack and appealed for help to set him back on the path. But the man had no desire to step outside and guide a dirt-caked foreigner back to the road, until enticed by a piece of silver.

The rider still had seven miles to go. He groped his way forward as the horse stumbled in ankle-deep dust. Eventually, he collided with a tree and felt his way along a familiar avenue until he reached the outskirts of the old town. Then, as if conceding defeat, the wind abated and lights could be glimpsed through the murky dark. He crossed a creaking wooden bridge to reach the mud walls that encircled the oasis. The guns that signaled the sunset closing of the iron gates to the old Muslim oasis had been fired hours ago. The only sound was the howling of dogs, alert to the clip-clopping of a stranger on horseback pa.s.sing outside the high wall. He continued until he reached a laneway. He had covered more than sixty miles to reach Chini Bagh, the home of good friends and an unlikely outpost of British sensibilities on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Its gates were open in antic.i.p.ation. He shouted to announce his arrival. For a moment, silence. Then surprised voices erupted in the darkness as servants recognized him. At last Aurel Stein had arrived. They moved closer to greet the man they had not seen for five years. At forty-three, he was no longer young, but his features were as angular as ever, and his body-though just five feet four inches tall-still deceptively strong.

Water was fetched so he could scrub away the sweat and grime etched into his skin. Only then did he present himself in the dining room. He eased into a chair, glad at last to sit on something other than his exhausted horse, and talked with his friends until well past midnight. At the dining table were Britain's representative in Kashgar, George Macartney, and his wife, Catherine Theodora, both eager to hear of Stein's journey so far and, equally important, his hopes for the trip ahead. The last time they had been together in Chini Bagh, in 1901, the explorer was at the end of his first expedition to Turkestan. He had been loaded with ancient treasures recovered from the desert, treasures that would stun scholars across Europe. Now he had returned, better equipped, better funded and better educated about the obstacles that lay ahead. George Macartney had been invaluable then, helping Stein a.s.semble the crew that would pluck antiquities from beneath the sands. This time, the stakes were higher, the journey longer and the route more deadly.

As they talked into the night of June 8, 1906, Stein had much to tell of the two-month trip that had brought him to Chini Bagh's welcoming doorstep. His weather-beaten face had barely recovered from his trip over the mountains that separated Chinese Turkestan from northern India. The high-alt.i.tude sun left his face so blistered and swollen he had wondered if his friends would recognize him. But sunburn was the least of the hards.h.i.+ps he encountered.

His journey had begun on April 2, when he set out from northern India on a cold but sunny day. Spring had not yet greened the native chinar trees, nor had the irises sprouted as Stein left the alpine Kashmir Valley with a fox terrier named Dash at his heels. His intended route, at times following the footsteps of Alexander the Great, led up through the far north of present-day Pakistan, through lawless tribal territory, and briefly across Afghan terrain before descending to Turkestan. He knew robbery-or worse-was a risk and that at least one foreign explorer had been beheaded in the region, so he was armed with Lee-Enfield carbines and Webley revolvers. His path led over ”the roof of the world,” the Pamir Mountains whose jagged peaks are some of the highest on earth. The route was the quickest way to Kashgar, and he had every reason to hurry.

But the course was treacherous in the spring, as the arrival of Stein's faithful old caravan man, Muhammadju, attested. On the way to join Stein for this second, more audacious exploration of Central Asia, Muhammadju narrowly escaped an avalanche on a mountain pa.s.s. Seven of his companions had been swept to their deaths. Indeed Stein himself, after pa.s.sing through the lower Swat Valley, was forced to spend two miserable days in a leaky, crumbling shelter near the foot of one of the most avalanche-p.r.o.ne pa.s.ses, the Lowari, until a thunderstorm pa.s.sed and the sky cleared.

The snow had been abnormally heavy the previous winter, and he had been warned not to attempt the crossing before June. But that was still a month off. If he waited until then, the gorges farther along his route would be rendered impa.s.sable by floodwaters from the melting snow. Stein knew the risks in early May could be reduced by crossing the 10,230-foot Lowari Pa.s.s at night, when plummeting temperatures firmed the snow fields into a hard crust. He divided his team of men and pack animals into three groups and spread his cargo so that each animal's burden was no more than forty pounds. Then, at 1 a.m., with only moonlight and their lamps to guide them, Stein led the first group on the slow ascent. The other teams followed at fifteen-minute intervals to reduce the weight on the snow. All were aware that somewhere beneath their feet lay the frozen bodies of seventeen ponies and two dozen men who had perished there five months earlier when attempting to cross in a snowstorm.

As dawn broke, Stein reached the wind-blown top of the Lowari Pa.s.s and saw that his frustrating wait had been justified. About halfway down he spotted the signs of an avalanche that had swept through on the previous afternoon. He watched anxiously as his porters zigzagged their way down the almost sheer descent. As he reached the bottom of the pa.s.s and looked back at his other teams, one sight cheered him: his incompetent, troublesome cook being carried down and looking ”more like a log than an animate being,” he later wrote. The useless cook (Stein had a string of them) was ”incapable of facing prolonged hard travel, even when fortified by clandestine drink and doses of opium.” Stein planned to offload him in Kashgar.

Stein and his men continued through the mountains for most of May. The thin ”poisonous air” made breathing difficult and caused severe high-alt.i.tude headaches. At times men sank up to their armpits in the snow and had to be pulled out by ropes. When they reached the Wakhan Corridor, the narrow strip of Afghan terrain that sticks out like a pointed finger in the country's northeast, they supplemented their caravan with a team of yaks.

Dash, almost invisible against the snow except for his one black ear, crossed the mountains with only a single complaint: a rare, subdued whine uttered as he traversed the 16,152-foot Wakhjir Pa.s.s that separated Afghanistan from Turkestan. Stein felt his two-year-old fox terrier had more than earned the n.o.ble t.i.tle he bestowed on him as a high-spirited puppy. His full name was Kardash Beg, Sir Snow Friend. As Stein descended the mountains into Turkestan he did so riding a yak with brave Dash mounted in front of him.

George and Catherine Macartney knew what drove their stocky middle-aged visitor to embark on his dangerous journey. It was not a thirst for adventures, although there would be plenty of those. Ideas were what fired him. Stein spoke of lost worlds, ancient civilizations and early encounters between East and West. He craved to know how ideas and cultures spread. And one in particular: how had tolerant, compa.s.sionate Buddhism, born in the Indian Himalayas, reached China, transforming and shape-s.h.i.+fting along the way? He was convinced the answer lay just beyond Kashgar, beneath the Taklamakan Desert, the vast almond-shaped eye in the center of Chinese Turkestan.

But this was not a landscape that surrendered its answers readily. With dunes that can rise 1,000 feet, the Taklamakan is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Even its local name has an ominous, if apocryphal, translation: Go in and you won't come out. Its s.h.i.+fting dunes, beside which the deserts of Arabia, Africa, and America seemed tame to Stein, are not the only formidable barriers to would-be explorers. To the east lies the legendary Gobi Desert. In the other three directions loom some of the world's highest mountain ranges: the Kunlun and Karakorams to the south, the Pamirs to the west and the Tian Shan, or Celestial Mountains, to the north. No divine protector could have conjured a more effective cosmic ”keep out” sign.

Much depended on this latest expedition. Stein had only reached this point by the tenacious persuasion of his dual masters-the British Museum and the government of India-and each would demand tangible results in return. Soon after starting his journey he had met with the new Viceroy of India, Lord Minto. They spoke of Stein's lofty hopes for another Troy, the archaeological site excavated by the German Heinrich Schliemann less than forty years earlier. The expectations circulating around Stein were high. Minto was encouraging, even when Stein said he could not promise another set of Elgin Marbles, the cla.s.sical Greek sculptures removed from the Parthenon and brought to Britain in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the treasures he brought back would in time invite comparisons as China's Elgin Marbles. What Stein's masters wanted were antiquities to fill their museums and add prestige to the Empire. Some fortunate archaeologists and adventurers could fund their own explorations, but Stein was a civil servant and obliged to plead and cajole for time away from desk-bound duties in steamy Calcutta. And he did so for what to many must have seemed dubious rewards. Although he lived in an era of exploration, Europe's attention was focused on the rich archaeological pickings closer to home-especially in Greece, Egypt and the biblical Middle East. These were places where the roots of Western culture could be discerned and where the show-stopper h.o.a.rds of gold, jewels, and tombs covered in hieroglyphics ignited the public's imagination. Few people gave more than a pa.s.sing thought to the backblocks of Muslim Central Asia, let alone the possibility that lost Buddhist kingdoms might lie buried beneath its vast sands. Who even knew that long before the rise of Islam, a great Buddhist civilization had flourished across what we know today as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the far west of China? Who even cared?

Stein knew-and cared-more than most. He had already completed his first successful foray into the southern part of the Taklamakan, returning from his yearlong trip with evidence of sophisticated and unknown cultures. Among his treasures were coins, statues, and murals, but to Stein, with his love of the written word, it was the doc.u.ments that were most fascinating. He returned with records on wood, paper, and leather and in a range of languages: Chinese, Tibetan, and, most intriguingly, ancient Indian scripts. Doc.u.ments can never compete with glittering jewels and golden statues for dramatic, visual appeal, but for Stein they could reveal so much more. To his trained eye, the written word exposed how language, people, and customs traveled and revealed the poignant details of ordinary life. Whether it recorded the daily duties of soldiers, the ch.o.r.es of monks or even the clumsy attempts of a child to complete his schoolwork, a doc.u.ment could reconst.i.tute a life, and through that Stein could glimpse a civilization. Such discoveries had dazzled his colleagues and made his name as an archaeologist and explorer. They also made him hungry for more.

His first expedition laid essential groundwork. It was an apprentices.h.i.+p during which he made vital contacts and friends.h.i.+ps among the Muslim begs (headmen) and the Chinese ambans (high-ranking officials) along the desert's southern oases. He had a.s.sembled a trusted team of men, some of whom, like Muhammadju, rejoined him for his second expedition. His first trip had convinced him he could push much farther into the desert to uncover the secrets of the sands. If successful, he would cement his reputation and he could then devote his life to uncovering ancient knowledge. And if he failed? He risked forever being frustrated as a colonial wage slave and never again being allowed the freedom to explore.

He knew his intended route across the desert was feasible, if dangerous. The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin had proved it about a decade earlier. Hedin was the first European in living memory-and possibly the first since Marco Polo-to succeed. Younger and more gung-ho than Stein, Hedin had left two of his men dead from thirst-and nearly succ.u.mbed himself. Hedin had plucked long-buried items from the sands as he charged across the desert, but he was a geographer and cartographer, not an archaeologist. His interest was in the terrain, not what might lie below it. Even so, Hedin's example helped prompt Stein to mount his own more careful, systematic exploration.

As Stein and the Macartneys conversed around the wooden dining table at Chini Bagh, the immediate concerns were practical. Stein's main task in Kashgar was to put together the team of men and animals for a two-year journey. The wise selection of both would be critical to its success. He had brought some supplies and men with him over the mountains, and he had spent all winter in India ama.s.sing the essentials he would need for the long road ahead. Among these were 2,000 fragile gla.s.s negatives to photograph the landscape, the finds and the faces he encountered along the way. A medicine chest held opium for pain relief, iodine for antiseptic, and quinine for malaria, from which he suffered repeatedly. He was equipped for minor surgery with forceps, suture needles, and silk. He imported quant.i.ties of dried food, including tins of Symington's pea soup and Captain Cookesley's Scotch broth and tomato soup, fifty pounds of tea, and ten pots of a nutritious new food, a salty yeast extract called Marmite. When Stein dispatched his shopping list to his London supplier, he penned a stiff letter to accompany the order: he wanted no repeat of the ”regrettable” experience on his first expedition when the dried vegetables they supplied had spoiled within three months. He preferred bland English ”sahib” food to local fare, even if he couldn't always find a cook able to prepare it. Stein was not a fussy eater, but perhaps only he could have thrived on a diet that included fifteen quarter-pound containers of desiccated cabbage.

He prepared for his expedition like a military chief mounting a campaign. No detail, however small, escaped him. He even ordered some lengths of Liberty silk brocade for gifts, which he knew would be appreciated in Turkestan and help smooth the path ahead. Stein was typically specific about what he wanted: good-quality pink and green floral and a cheaper length in yellow. If it seemed ironic to take silk back to the Silk Road, Stein gave no hint of this when he asked a friend in London to please mail some to him. His tent, which had been made for his first expedition and lined to withstand the cold, was repaired, felt boots and furs were sewn. His Jaeger wool blanket was packed, as was a canvas bath. Even Dash got his own custom-made fur coat. Stein had to prepare for all weathers, from baking desert heat to nights so cold he would sleep breathing through the sleeve of his coat.

The small party that started out with him from India included two men named Ram Singh. The older Ram Singh was an experienced Gurkha surveyor who had accompanied Stein's first expedition. The other was a thirty-two-year-old Indian Army handyman/carpenter known as the Naik, or corporal. The Naik, who packed in his bags the uniform of his engineering regiment, would also sketch ancient ruins. Stein considered the Naik's youth an advantage in learning new skills such as photography and enduring the hards.h.i.+ps ahead.

Macartney had been searching for months for other experienced hands to join the explorer in Kashgar, but this was no easy task. Macartney telegrammed Stein en route with an update on his efforts, including a few words about one unlikely caravan member. ”Sadiq now in Chinese prison; but if you want him can probably get him out.” Apparently Stein did not want him. Aside from being proof of Macartney's sway, the telegram suggests the lengths to which he was prepared to go to a.s.sist Stein. Now Stein needed Macartney's help to find the expedition's most crucial member: a Chinese a.s.sistant and interpreter. Of all the ways Macartney would help Stein-from arranging water tanks to organizing Stein's travel doc.u.ments-finding the right man for this role would be the most vital. Stein planned to travel much farther east than on his first trip, this time into ”China proper,” as he called it. Although he was fluent in many languages, Chinese was not one of them. He needed an a.s.sistant who could not only speak the language, but who knew China's culture and protocols. He expected to uncover ancient Chinese written material and needed someone who could grasp its meaning on the spot. And he wanted someone who could teach him colloquial Chinese. Moreover, his a.s.sistant would need to be fit and have the temperament to withstand the rigors of desert travel. It was a tall order.

Chinese scholars were rare in far-flung Turkestan. The few who existed had been posted to sedentary, pen-pus.h.i.+ng jobs in a local yamen or district office. They would hardly view as attractive a position that involved camping in a tent for months, with little more than Stein, a team of scruffy laborers and flatulent camels for company. Macartney had been keeping his eye out for a suitable candidate and had good news for Stein. He had learned of an educated Chinese man known as Chiang-ssu-yeh (Jiang Siye), or Secretary Chiang, who might be suitable. Chiang was believed to speak Turki, the local language. That would need to be their common tongue. Stein had learned Turki from a mullah during his first stay in Kashgar. Macartney would send for Chiang, but it would be ten days before he arrived.

Macartney knew all too well the reasons for Stein's race to Kashgar and his eagerness to get his caravan together as quickly as possible. Stein had fought long and hard to get this expedition under way. He had badgered and maneuvered, he had planned with meticulous care. But his masters had dragged their feet, delaying him a year. In that time formidable compet.i.tion had mobilized. Others now had their eye on what Stein regarded as his stamping ground, among them teams from Germany and France. They were rivals for Turkestan's treasures who, gallingly, had been inspired by the success of Stein's first trip to mount their own expeditions. They had their eyes on the very places to which Stein was headed. The French were en route to the desert and the Germans had already arrived. Macartney had been quietly monitoring the latter's movements for months. It was a rare intruder who could slip into Turkestan without the knowledge of the ever-watchful George Macartney.

2.

Signs of Wonder.

Aurel Stein hardly looked the archetypal explorer. With his well-trimmed moustache and fastidiously parted dark hair, he appeared more dapper banker than a man who would cross desert wastes and rugged mountains and whose discoveries would transform our knowledge of the Silk Road. The man who would make off with the Silk Road's greatest treasure had prominent cheekbones, a high forehead and, even in old age, retained a firm, determined jaw. In photographs, he has a stiff, almost military air as he stands, hands in pockets, with his dark brown eyes more often fixed on a distant horizon than looking directly to camera. Whether posed in a pressed dark suit or bundled in a fur-lined coat to fend off the desert wind, a handkerchief often pokes jauntily from a breast pocket.

He was not driven by physical pleasure. Food and drink were simply fuel for long hours of work. Years of meager suppers eaten at midnight in his tent prompted few complaints, although these may not have helped the dyspepsia he suffered from throughout his life. A friend was so horrified by the state of Stein's kitchen that he marveled at the explorer's immunity to typhoid. Stein once served the same friend breakfast porridge that emitted a pungent odor. Impervious to gastronomic matters, Stein had stored his bag of oats in a chest that also contained mothb.a.l.l.s.

He never married, never had a family and never appeared to have any romantic involvement with women or men. He had several long-lasting friends.h.i.+ps, but there is nothing to suggest these were anything other than platonic. His friends.h.i.+ps endured despite, or perhaps because of, long separations of time and distance. Although he mused repeatedly in his letters on the great joy he derived from his friends and how he wished he could be in their company, he chose a life that kept him from them for years at a time. Work, not romance, propelled him. And the work he valued was not easily undertaken with a wife and family in tow or abandoned while he disappeared into some of the world's most inaccessible and dangerous places. For this he chose to forgo a family, a home and material riches, although he may not have regarded this as a sacrifice. His reams of letters, written in a firm cursive hand-thousands of pages of which are now held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford-give no sense that the lack of these troubled him. Nor do they give more than a rare glimpse into his inner life. Even by the b.u.t.toned-down standards of the Victorian times through which he lived, Stein was the most private of men.

Few could follow a clue like Stein. His persistence in pursuing leads-often from seemingly unpromising sources-was extraordinary. One friend dubbed him Sherlock Holmes for his ability to infer much from scant information. He frequently consulted the centuries-old accounts by his heroes, the Venetian Marco Polo and China's great pilgrim monk Xuanzang, both of whom left detailed travel reports Stein could accurately cross-reference.

He had no permanent home. The closest he came was a canvas tent he pitched in a meadow in mountainous Kashmir, where he lived on and off for years. He retreated to Mohand Marg, north of the Kashmiri summer capital Srinagar, whenever he could. There he would walk, plan his expeditions or write. Surrounded by snow-capped mountains, he set his square wooden desk under pine trees, with vases of alpine flowers the only domestic flourish. He seems to most resemble the itinerant scholar-monks of China's Buddhist past, not least his ”patron saint” Xuanzang. He was a lone wanderer.

But he did have one constant companion. He was rarely without a little dog at his side. He had a succession of seven over fifty years, all but one a fox terrier. Without exception, he named them Dash. Stein was not a man to waste time, not even on thinking up names for his dogs. The st.u.r.dy little fox terriers, known for their endurance and capacity for hard work, were an apt choice for a man with both traits in abundance. Stein's favorite by far was Dash II, his fellow traveler on what would be his greatest expedition. The smooth-haired terrier cleared mountain pa.s.ses of more than 18,000 feet above sea level, quaffing saucers of tea along the way. He spent the days scampering alongside the caravan, and only occasionally joining Stein on ”pony back.” But each night was spent together in the relative comfort of Stein's tent. In time, Stein would confer an ill.u.s.trious t.i.tle on his intrepid canine: Dash the Great.

Little in Stein's family background suggested the life he would lead. Born in Budapest into a middle-cla.s.s Jewish family, he was baptized Lutheran. Such a practice was not uncommon then for the access it gave to education and the career doors it could open. Perhaps his name, Marc Aurel Stein, after the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, hinted at grand parental ambitions. He was a late, unexpected arrival for his mother Anna, then forty-five, and his struggling merchant father Nathan. They had already raised two children-Ernst was twenty-one and Theresa nineteen-when Stein was born on November 26, 1862. The age gap between himself and his parents and siblings may have prepared him for a solitary, self-reliant life. Certainly his education was overseen not so much by his parents but by Ernst and an uncle who was a pioneering ophthalmologist.