Part 4 (1/2)

Some weeks after he left the caves, Stein sent a message to see if Abbot w.a.n.g would sell more ma.n.u.scripts. Emboldened by the knowledge that his previous transaction had remained a secret, the priest tentatively agreed. To avoid arousing local suspicions, Stein remained in Anxi, instead dispatching Chiang on a secret mission with Ibrahim Beg, Ha.s.san Akhun, and four camels.

The trio duly arrived at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas in late September, but the inopportune appearance of half a dozen Tibetan monks at the same time reignited w.a.n.g's nervousness. Chiang dodged the red-robed visitors and, once again, w.a.n.g relented. The ma.n.u.scripts were hurriedly packed into sacks throughout the night and loaded onto the camels.

A week after setting out, traveling under cover of darkness and avoiding the high road, they returned to Stein. Chiang ”trotted up gaily overflowing with glee at [the] success of his mission.” He had secured a further 230 bundles, containing about 3,000 scrolls. Most were Chinese Buddhist sutras, but there were also twenty bundles of Tibetan Buddhist works and they filled twelve more boxes. The size of the second haul had exceeded Stein's hopes.

Just a few weeks after Chiang pa.s.sed through Dunhuang, where he saw the results of the riots, another European, Baron Carl Gustav Mannerheim, also arrived. He was gathering intelligence for the Russians, as well as ma.n.u.scripts and other artifacts for his Finnish homeland. He had traveled part of the way from Tashkent to Kashgar with Paul Pelliot and planned to visit the Mogao Caves. But when the time came, the aristocratic Mannerheim, who later became Finland's president, went off to shoot pheasant instead.

Stein and Chiang had no more time to look closely at the scrolls and other doc.u.ments while camped at Anxi than they had at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. The sheer volume of material made detailed doc.u.menting impossible. As a result, the printed Diamond Sutra wasn't properly numbered until it arrived in London, so it is not certain whether it was in the rolls Stein originally purchased from Abbott w.a.n.g or among the later bundles which Chiang secured. What is certain is that the acquisition of the world's oldest printed book was for Stein the happiest of accidents.

Of the material Stein did examine, it was not the Chinese sutras that most excited him but Indian ma.n.u.scripts written on palm leaves. And he was delighted to have obtained so much material for so little money. The entire haul from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas had cost just 130. ”The single ancient Sanskrit MS [ma.n.u.script] on palm leaf might with a few other 'old things' be worth this,” he told Allen. It was certainly a pittance compared with other book sales of the era. When the fifth Earl Spencer, Princess Diana's great-grandfather, sold his library at Althorp in 1891 the 40,000 volumes realized almost 250,000. Just a few years later, a Gutenberg Bible sold in London for a record-breaking 4,000.

Stein had little time to reflect on the many pearls he had extracted. More mundane matters needed attention. He had a report to write and his Christmas mail to pen. Even in the desert Stein never forgot to send seasonal greetings or mark the birthdays of friends. He also had to replace his surveyor, Ram Singh, whom Stein had found increasingly problematic. Publicly, Stein acknowledged the work of his surveyor. But to Allen he was more candid: ”Ram Singh's rheumatism has disappeared for the time being, but not his bad temper etc & I could not have expected from him effective a.s.sistance next winter. It has cost much firmness & constant care to get all needful work done by him so far & you can imagine that this means much additional strain,” he wrote. With the arrival of a replacement surveyor, Lal Singh, Ram Singh was dispatched from Anxi on the long trip home to India, where he arrived safely three months later.

Stein was relieved to put sedentary work behind him and pull out of Anxi. Chiang had even greater reason to see the back of the dreary settlement. Until his gleeful recent arrival with the ma.n.u.scripts, his only connection with the hamlet was a sorrowful one. About a decade earlier, he had set out with a friend on a rare journey home to Hunan when his companion suddenly fell ill and died. Chiang wrapped the corpse in felts and wrote and ceremoniously burned a prayer for his dead companion's soul, ”asking him to keep his own body from becoming objectionable & to prevent a breakdown of the cart.” For a week, Chiang traveled with the corpse on his cart. At Anxi he bought a coffin and accompanied the body, delivering it to his friend's relatives five months later. In his diary, Stein reflects on Chiang's loyal deed: ”Not with a word he alluded to all the trouble arising from this pious performance. How many Europeans would be prepared for such sacrifices?”

Stein and his own cargo had much farther to travel. Anxi was a turning point. The summer excursion in the mountains, where he surveyed 24,000 square miles, took him as far east into China as he intended to go. When he came down from the mountains, he knew his journey back to India and Europe had begun. In early October 1907, he turned his caravan northwest and headed along the northern Silk Road, bound for the oases of Hami and Turfan.

The caravan skirted along the Turfan Depression, a region 500 feet below the level of the far-distant sea. Stein was happy to return to Turkestan, where he felt so at home. Although he had not traveled along the northern route before, with each step he felt he was on familiar terrain. He was again among Muslim people whose customs and culture he understood. Soon, there was milk to drink. He had been without it since arriving in Dunhuang seven months earlier. Despite the fine grazing land he had traversed in that time, the terrain had been devoid of cattle.

He noticed the women shared a fondness for the bright clothes of their Turkestan sisters farther west. Best of all, he no longer had to use silver weighed on scales-Stein considered them ”instruments of torture”-to pay for everything. There were familiar sights from farther afield. The Turfan bazaars were so full of Russian goods-kerosene lamps, plate gla.s.s, and chintz-that he dubbed the area ”Demi-Europe.” And he saw signs of more ancient cultural exchange around the oasis. He realized a Christian minority had once lived peacefully alongside Turfan's Buddhists.

If Stein and his team were happy to return to Turkestan, perhaps only Chiang felt otherwise. For him it was a continuation of the long exile from the land of his birth. He did not expect to return to Hunan-and his wife and son-until his working life was over.

Ancient sites were plentiful along the more populated northern Silk Road. Stein and his caravan pa.s.sed through areas where farmers used temple ruins as manure for crops and ma.n.u.script fragments to paper over windows. It was evidence to Stein that antiquities could not safely remain where history had deposited them. Unlike the southern route, which Stein regarded as his own terrain, the more accessible northern route had attracted other foreign archaeological treasure hunters, from j.a.pan, Russia, and Germany. Stein had little interest in digging where others had already been. With a certain one-upmans.h.i.+p he noted how less arduous it was for his rivals to excavate around Turfan, where laborers could return home each night. There was no need for complicated plans to transport water and food in preparation for weeks in the desert. It was ”like excavating in one's own garden,” he sniffed.

However, he was curious to see what the Germans had been up to. So in late November 1907, he stopped at the abandoned Buddhist grottoes of Bezeklik where Albert von Le Coq had cut out whole murals and sent them to Berlin's Ethnographic Museum. The German was convinced they would otherwise be destroyed by iconoclasts or by farmers for their fields. Nonetheless, above the door of the room where he'd stayed while removing Bezeklik's murals, von Le Coq had contributed a painting of his own, a message that said: ”Robbers' Den.”

It was while exploring in nearby Hami in mid-1905 that von Le Coq first heard the rumor of the ma.n.u.scripts discovered at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas-news that Stein would not learn for another year and a half. A merchant from Tashkent who had traveled through Dunhuang told von Le Coq about a walled-up cave that had been found nearby. The cave was full of ma.n.u.scripts n.o.body could read. The temple guardian would surely be willing to part with them, the merchant told him. Von Le Coq was intrigued but wary. He had already been led on one excursion prompted by a rumor and returned empty-handed. Nonetheless, von Le Coq resolved to make the seventeen-day trip to Dunhuang-until a telegram arrived from Berlin. His boss, Professor Grnwedel, was headed to Turkestan and von Le Coq was to meet him in Kashgar in October. It was now late August. There was no way von Le Coq could get to Dunhuang and back in time to meet Grnwedel. Kashgar was 1,100 miles west and six weeks away, Dunhuang 250 miles southeast. Von Le Coq was in a quandary.

”Somewhat in despair, I left the decision to Fate by tossing a Chinese dollar,” he wrote in an account of his travels. Heads he would go to Dunhuang, tails to Kashgar. He flipped the coin. It landed tails. Von Le Coq saddled his horse and left for Kashgar. And so, on the toss of a coin, he lost the chance to claim the Library Cave's treasures for Germany. Little wonder von Le Coq was not in the best of tempers when he reached Chini Bagh on October 17, 1905 and found no sign of Grnwedel, who did not arrive for another seven weeks. Stuck in Kashgar, von Le Coq knew he could easily have reached Dunhuang and investigated the merchant's rumor.

Stein, who long harbored fears about his compet.i.tors, had little idea just how close he came to being beaten to his greatest prize. By the time he learned of the Library Cave, von Le Coq was back in Berlin. As Stein stood in the abandoned Bezeklik caves and stared at the denuded walls, he was aware only that the grottoes there, unlike those at Dunhuang, were no longer places of wors.h.i.+p. ”How much greater would be the chance for the survival of these art remains in situ if only Turfan still held such a pious image-loving population as Tun-huang?” he wrote.

After his side trip to Bezeklik, Stein pushed west and soon marked his second Christmas of the expedition. A few days into 1908, boxes of chocolate reached him from the Allens in Britain. Stein immediately penned a gracious thank-you-one that ill.u.s.trates his utilitarian approach to food. For Stein, even the rare luxury of chocolate was simply a means to stave off hunger pangs and supplement his diet. ”How often I have thanked you at the late hours of the night when dinner was still far off & a headache approaching as a reminder of bodily needs, for your incomparable forethought! I shall need such nouris.h.i.+ng & tasteful 'iron reserves' for the next few months too, for quick marches are needed to make up for time.”

A couple of spills delayed his pace. Two cases and a camera fell into a ca.n.a.l and were soaked. A few days later, two rutting camels absconded and the rest of the day was spent tracking them. But these were minor hitches compared with the sorrowful tidings the new year brought for Chiang. Since he'd set out with Stein, Chiang had hoped for word of his elderly father. At Kucha he intercepted a letter to his uncle in Kashgar and learned the reason for the long silence. Chiang's father had died twenty months earlier. Grief-stricken, he lamented most that his sixty-four-year-old father had not seen him reach high office. Despite his usual skepticism about such rites, Chiang abandoned his customary bright silk clothes, dressed in dark cotton mourning, and arranged a funeral feast for his father's long-departed soul.

As Chiang grieved, Stein made preparations in Kucha for their return to Khotan on the far side of the Taklamakan Desert. In Khotan, he would pack all of his antiquities for their journey to India and London. To reach Khotan, he planned to cross the desert by a perilous shortcut he had learned about from a guide on his first expedition. The route was known as the old ”Thieves' Road” and was once favored by ”robbers and others who had reason to avoid the highways.” To some it might seem appropriate that the man who removed so many treasures would make his exit via a route so named.

The course was riskier than any he had ever attempted. No European had been known to cross the Taklamakan from north to south. Although Sven Hedin had traveled in the opposite direction in 1896, Stein's plan was far more dangerous. The reason is simple: Hedin followed the Keriya River until it disappeared into the Taklamakan's sands. Hedin knew that if he continued north, the west-to-east flowing Tarim River would cross his path. (Upon finding the Tarim River, Hedin sailed along it while dining on wild duck, pheasant, and rice pudding.) But Stein's plan meant he had to leave the safety of the Tarim River and locate the very spot amid the dunes where the Keriya River trickled out. There were no maps other than Hedin's. Even if Hedin had mapped it perfectly, the river could have changed course by miles in the intervening twelve years, leaving Stein at risk of traveling parallel to-or even away from-the water. Why Stein undertook so dangerous a shortcut is unclear. He was determined, certainly, but never foolhardy. He was no longer racing the Germans or the French. And even if a rival expedition should suddenly emerge from the desert dunes, Stein had already secured his glittering prizes from the hidden library. Although he justified the journey by a desire to save time-and see some ruins-it was the pull of the desert itself that seemed irresistible. ”I must confess that, even without this specific reason, I might have found the chance of once more crossing the very heart of the desert too great an attraction to resist.”

His antiquities, his ”precious but embarra.s.sing impedimenta,” could not come with him. Instead, he sent them under the care of Chiang and pony man Tila Bai along a safer and better known route that followed the Khotan River. For more than an hour on a cold winter day, all traffic in the narrow street of Kucha was blocked as the caravan of twenty-four heavily laden camels began their journey south to Khotan. If all went well, Stein would see Chiang and the antiquities again in two and a half months.

He needed a local guide before he could set out across the desert with his smaller party. But none of the potential guides knew anything about the alleged shortcut. They knew only the route his antiquities were taking. Even the most experienced guide in the area, a stooped hunter in his eighties named Khalil, denied any knowledge of such a route. Khalil walked with difficulty but could nonetheless ride, and he agreed to escort Stein to the Tarim River. It was better than nothing. From there, Stein would negotiate his way unaided through 200 miles of waterless towering dunes toward the river's end. Little wonder his conscripted laborers were reluctant, despite the promise of extra wages. First they argued they were unfit for such a journey or lacked ample clothing. Then they fell on their knees and prayed for release from dreaded sufferings and certain disaster. Who could blame them?

Eventually, led by Khalil, Stein's party of twenty men, fifteen camels (including eight to carry ice) and four ponies, carrying enough food for six weeks, headed toward the distant ocean of sand. After nearly two weeks of marching, they encountered a line of poplars tenaciously clinging to life on the edge of a dry river bed. But perhaps not for much longer. Water from the Tarim River that once ensured their survival no longer reached the trees, according to Khalil. It was hardly an auspicious sign as they were poised to enter the desert on January 31. Before turning back, old Khalil delivered a farewell blessing, one that might have unsettled, rather than comforted, the nervous a.s.sembly. ”He gave it with more ceremony than I should have expected for the occasion, turning towards Mecca in a long prayer, and the men all joining loudly in the 'Aman'. From Khotan to Lop-nor I had made more than one start into desert quite as forbidding, without ever witnessing such a display of emotion.”

The marches through the sand dunes were exhausting. Everyone walked on foot, some days covering fifteen miles. After eight days they reached a dried-up delta somewhere in which the Keriya River died away. But where? ”Nowhere in the course of my desert travels had I met ground so confusing and dismal,” Stein subsequently confessed. The view in all directions was bewilderingly uniform: endless dunes interspersed with stumps of dead trees and tamarisk cones-strange mounds that form as sand buries the tamarisk tree until only the top boughs are visible.

”My secret apprehension that our real trouble would begin on reaching this dead delta was about to be fully verified. It was as if, after navigating an open sea, we had reached the treacherous marsh-coast of a tropical delta without any lighthouses or landmarks to guide us into the right channel,” Stein wrote.

His anxiety increased as each day pa.s.sed without sight of the river. In the first days of the journey, wells dug into the sand had yielded only a little moisture, and Stein noted how the ears of the ponies would p.r.i.c.k up at the sound of hoes striking mud. But as successive efforts to locate the source of the Keriya River proved futile and additional wells dug up to sixteen feet into the ground surrendered nothing, spirits sank. Water was rationed to one pint per man a day. It was a meager amount for hard marching across endless dunes. The camels received little food and no water. ”How the camels held out so far is a wonder,” Stein wrote in his diary eleven days after Khalil's ominous farewell.

By then the camels and ponies were being fed twigs for the moisture in the sap. Although Dash survived on saucers of Stein's tea, the ponies suffered badly. Stein knew they could not last much longer. On February 12, he counted the cartridges in the holster of his revolver to ensure he could end their suffering if necessary. The mood of the laborers was darkening and Stein feared they might steal what little ice was left. He a.s.signed Lal Singh to guard the remaining supply. Twice in the night when Stein approached to check on its safety, he was challenged by his own surveyor. Stein had little sleep and was awake by 3 a.m.

By daybreak the laborers were on the verge of mutiny and refused to travel further. To turn around would have meant certain death. There was enough water for the men to last just a few days but nowhere near enough to retrace their steps to the Tarim River. They continued with Stein, but he knew time was running out. Lal Singh was ordered to halt the caravan and prepare what Stein termed a ”starvation camp.” Even the camels, without water for nearly two weeks, were reaching the limits of their endurance. Stein left his caravan behind and marched on until he reached a 300-foot dune. With Dash at his side he trudged to the summit. He scoured the distance through his binoculars. Four miles to the south, he could see four white streaks. Ice? Salt? Or the desert traveler's cruelest tormentor, a mirage?

News of Stein's sighting spurred his exhausted men. So too did the sight of footprints made by a bird that the laborers knew lived near fresh water. As they continued, a camel boy who had surged ahead rushed back toward them. He was too breathless to speak but carried a chunk of ice from the elusive river. When he recovered, he shared his life-saving news: the river was just half a mile ahead. The caravan crested one more dune and looked down on a glittering sheet of clear ice about 500 feet wide. The river had indeed changed course since Hedin's journey. The men rushed to the river bank and fell on their knees to drink the water. The camels and ponies swelled visibly as they slaked their thirst. After sixteen days of marching across the Taklamakan's dunes, they had at last found the end of the Keriya River.

A bodhisattva who still depends on notions to practice generosity is like someone walking in the dark.

VERSE 14, THE DIAMOND SUTRA.

11.

Affliction in the Orchard Six weeks after Stein located the life-saving river, he reached Khotan and was relieved to find his heavy caravan of antiquities had already arrived. They were stored at the house of Akhun Beg. Stein was overjoyed to be reunited with his elderly friend, who had returned from his own perilous journey, a pilgrimage to Mecca. Stein set up his tent in Akhun Beg's garden, beneath blossoming plum and apricot trees. But he had little time to enjoy the brief Turkestan spring. Ever since he'd left the abandoned sanctuary at Miran a year earlier, Stein was eager to return to where he had found the exquisite winged angels-and endured the most putrid ruins of his career. In his race to Dunhuang, he had abandoned his labors in the freezing filth without extracting all he knew lay buried there. Although Miran was 650 miles east of Khotan, this was his last chance to doc.u.ment, photograph, and remove the murals that remained. He could not go himself-he had other work to do-so he dispatched his Indian handyman, Naik Ram Singh. The young man, from a family of carpenters, had proved a reliable, versatile worker. He was strong, stoic, and quick to turn his hand to a range of tasks, including sketching, surveying, and developing photographic negatives. Stein knew the resourceful Naik could work without direction and so had no reservations about sending him, with Ibrahim Beg for a.s.sistance, on the 1,300-mile round trip.

Meanwhile, Stein prepared to head in the opposite direction, west, for further explorations before the summer heat arrived. Just before he left Khotan, a parcel arrived from Fred Andrews. It contained a fountain pen, pince-nez spectacles, and a much-needed new pair of gloves. ”I could not help smiling when I read how carefully you had considered the colour of the gloves,” Stein wrote to Andrews. ”You must think me quite a dandy in the desert, whereas in reality it is hard to look even respectable. You would make eyes if you would see me in my winter clothes, worn etc. almost beyond patching.”

Stein traveled as far as the oasis of Yarkand, where he made the first of many partings. He needed to sell his team of hardy Bactrian camels, which would no longer be needed. Yarkand was a crossroads and, with the trading season about to start, he expected to get a better price for them there than in Khotan. As the weather warmed, camel man Ha.s.san Akhun had shorn the double-humped beasts of their magnificent thick winter coats leaving them looking naked and gaunt. Nonetheless, their fame had spread along the desert oases as a result of their remarkable survival down the Thieves' Road. Eager buyers vied for the legendary animals, despite their high desert mileage after nearly two years of travel. The frugal Stein was delighted; he made a 70 percent profit on the deal. As a farewell gesture, he fed each camel a large loaf of bread before relinquis.h.i.+ng the reins to their new owner, an Afghan trader.

Buran season arrived while Stein was in Yarkand and a violent two-day sandstorm brought down trees and destroyed ripening mulberries and apricots in the oasis. By the time Stein left, he had to contend with intense heat as well. He traveled by night but several times lost his way in the wind and darkness. ”On one occasion when no light could be kept burning in the lantern there was nothing for it in the howling Buran but to lie down [...] & wait for the dawn,” he wrote.

He was pleased to return to the shelter of Khotan in June, although he knew an enormous task awaited. He needed to pack everything he had gathered in the previous two years for the journey to India and, from there, to Europe. Akhun Beg's residence was too small to accommodate all of Stein's finds. He needed the s.p.a.ce afforded by his favorite garden palace, Narbagh, with its pavilions, orchard, and beds of lilies. Since the previous year, when he had been guest of honor at a lavish feast, Narbagh's owner had died and the garden was divided between his heirs. The central pavilion, the most suitable place for summer quarters, had gone to the man's formidable dowager. She was reluctant to relocate a silkworm nursery, and it was only with the aid of an old Afghan friend that Stein managed to persuade her to house his large entourage.

Soon the many bags that had already arrived in Khotan under Chiang's care were joined by those Stein had sent for safekeeping to Macartney more than a year earlier, before Stein had crossed to Dunhuang. Macartney also sent sheets of tin-and drained Turkestan's supply of the commodity in the process-so Stein could safely pack his ma.n.u.scripts and other treasures for their journey beyond Turkestan. Narbagh had once echoed to the gentle strains of flutes that serenaded Stein at the feast in his honor; now the garden clanged with hammering and sawing as up to forty local laborers constructed case after st.u.r.dy tin-lined case. Stein watched the work progress, but the careful packing of his fragile antiquities he trusted to no one but himself.

Stein thought hard about how best to get his huge cargo from Turkestan to Europe. He had two options: land or sea. He could take it west via Russia, or south via India and onto a boat from Bombay. The Russian route was shorter and familiar. He had taken his goods that way in 1901, traveling via Kashgar and across the border to Osh in Russian Turkestan and then by train to Europe. He had needed only eight ponies for his antiquities and baggage for his first expedition. This cargo was roughly eight times the size. He needed twenty-four ponies just to carry the ma.n.u.scripts. But it would be impractical to take it all with him on a pa.s.senger train, and even if he could it would be prohibitively expensive. He also feared the loss of material conveyed on an unreliable train system-the same railway that had mislaid the luggage of the German Grnwedel and the Frenchman Pelliot.

India was a slower but safer option. He considered two routes via Kashmir. He ruled out one through Hunza and Gilgit, in present-day Pakistan, as impossible for heavily laden animals. The only solution was to take it all over the Karakoram Mountains via Ladakh and then to Kashmir. The hidden library's scrolls had survived entombed for a millennium because the dry desert atmosphere was devoid of humidity. They had reached Khotan unharmed. But ahead lay huge mountains, glacier-fed rivers, snow, and ice. It was potentially the most risky part of the journey for the Diamond Sutra and the rest of the ma.n.u.scripts. One leaky case could ruin paper forever. The fragile murals from Miran needed extra protection. They were strengthened by gluing strips of cotton to them, then repacked between insulating layers of reeds.

Stein had much to occupy him. As he packed, the future of the finds and his own fate increasingly filled his thoughts. He cared little for London, where he would be hemmed in by arid deserts of bureaucracy and mountains of paperwork. He hoped he might at least find a quiet corner suited to the idiosyncrasies of a man whose preferred habitats were deserts and alpine meadows.

”I shall be more than ever bound to the collection & with it to London, and you can feel what that means for me,” he wrote to Allen. ”I dread in advance its turmoil, its 'cage' feeling etc, to say nothing of prospective incarceration in [the British Museum's] bas.e.m.e.nts.” If only he could have help with the huge task that would await him. Someone such as his friend Fred Andrews. Stein resolved to escape his British Museum ”bondage” as quickly as possible.

Packing was tedious, with only a break at dusk to walk or ride through the dusty village roads with Dash for company. Returning to Europe would mean leaving behind his canine companion. The little dog had distinguished himself en route to Khotan when he detected a tiger near the camp. No one realized why Dash had barked constantly one night. The next morning the footprints of a huge beast were found nearby. It would be hard to part with brave Dash. But Stein didn't want to put him through a lengthy sea journey and quarantine in England. He had left behind Dash's predecessor in India in 1901, but the dog died the next year. Perhaps some friends in Punjab would take Dash II, Dash the Great. ”It is sad to think that I shall have to leave Dash when I go to England,” he told Allen. ”How lucky those are who like Dash do not know of impending separation!”

But more immediate concerns demanded his attention. First he had to hose down a problem caused by his ”worthless” Kashmiri cook. Ramzan, who had already absconded near Dunhuang, got into a sc.r.a.p with a man in Khotan over a pony. The badly injured local was covered in bruises when he was conveyed to Stein on a litter. Stein paid compensation and hoped that might be the end of the problematic servant's trouble. But apparently a fight over a pony was not all Ramzan engaged in at Khotan. Chiang heard rumors the cook was also procuring young women. Wearied by his cook's bad behavior, Stein explained that he could not concern himself with the morals of his staff. Nonetheless, Ramzan's behavior appalled Stein. ”Disgust at having to employ such a scoundrel keeps me awake half the night,” he wrote in his diary. But Stein retained his services. A cook, it seemed, was harder to replace than a surveyor.

Chiang spent his days surrounded by bundles of scrolls attempting to make a rough list of the Dunhuang ma.n.u.scripts. The results were thrilling, with Chiang turning up texts much older and more varied than Stein had expected when they began burrowing in the ”treasure cave.” It was time-consuming work. Chiang had looked at just a third of the ma.n.u.scripts at Khotan. ”You can imagine the trouble of unfolding rolls of thin paper, often 30 yards long & more, to search for colophons etc. Chiang is glued to his table from morning till late at night,” Stein wrote to Allen.

Chiang's work came to a sudden halt when he suffered a serious case of food poisoning. A photograph taken at Narbagh shows a gaunt Chiang, almost unrecognizable from the round-faced figure photographed in Dunhuang fifteen months earlier. ”He suffered awful pains for days & kept me busy as improvised doctor & superintendent of nursing. But at last he got over the attacks & is now slowly regaining strength & spirits. Faith in my medicines was the main cure,” Stein told Allen. And he plied poor Chiang with doses of the salty yeast extract sent out from England. ”Marmite turned to use at last,” he noted with satisfaction in his diary.

Stein too endured ill-health at Khotan. His malarial fevers returned, he suffered from a toothache and he became temporarily deaf in his left ear. Yet both men's ailments paled beside the affliction suffered by Naik Ram Singh. Shortly after setting out for Miran, the Naik's neck and back grew stiff. Soon he was struck by headaches that grew more intense each day. After five days, while sitting in an orchard to escape the noon heat, he began to reel and lost sight in one eye. Nonetheless, the hardy Sikh insisted on continuing, hoping his condition would improve. It worsened. At Miran, while clearing a temple with Ibrahim Beg, the Naik lost the vision in his other eye also. Still he waited-and hoped-for nearly two weeks. Finally he agreed to turn back and let Ibrahim Beg, a Muslim, guide him to Khotan. Although blind, Naik Ram Singh insisted on cooking his own food to avoid breaking caste rules, despite repeated campfire burns.