In Xanadu (43 page)

The dot on our map seemed to imply that today Tashkurgan was a substantial provincial town, and I was expecting something about the size of Berwick. Instead it mrned out to be a single street, dwarfed by mountains and lying on the edge of a featureless plain. Cold winds blew down from the mountains, raked along the pavements, then gusted out onto the steppe. It looked neither beautiful nor exotic. It was certainly not the sort of place one would wish to spend four days. There was a blacksmith, a
cay
shop, a man selling watermelons, another selling bread, a few labourers gawping at the Pakistanis and doing nothing in particular, a post office, a school, a hotel, a line of ragged poplars and on them a few blaring loudspeakers. From these issued stirring military ditties and what sounded like news reports. Few were listening to the music and none was able to understand the news. It was in Chinese and the people of Tashkurgan spoke only Turki.

In Tashkurgan we were back on Polo's trail for the first time since Yazd. He arrived here from Afghanistan sometime in 1272-3, having spent a year recovering from an illness that he caught in the High Pamirs. He disliked the Afghans: 'They are an evil and murderous generation, whose great delight is in the wine shop; for they have good wine (albeit boiled), and are great topers; in truth they are constantly getting drunk.' The Uigurs of Chinese Turkestan were little better. The natives are a wretched, niggardly set of people,' he wrote. They eat and drink in a miserable fashion.' Polo, however, did not see either race at their best since when he passed the two were busily trying to wipe each other out. Kubla Khan was facing a challenge from his cousin Khaidu Khan and Chinese Turkestan was the battlefield. It was never a particularly good idea to get in the way of a Mongol army, and to be caught between two was even less advisable.

Tashkurgan may thus have been an even less jolly place to visit in 1272 than it was for us in 1986. Some things, though, would have been the same. Polo, like Lou and me, would probably have been faced with his first pair of chopsticks, and for the first time would have to drink his tea from a bowl rather than a cup. He would have found a country in which garrisons of troops from the East kept watch over a strange mixture of peoples: Tajiks, Kazaks, Uigurs, Uzbecks, refugee Persians, Tibecans, and Han Chinese as well as the odd Pathan who had strayed from the hills beyond. Today this racial mix is dominated by Islam and the totalitarian ideology of Mao; then Polo would have come across an amazing eclecticism of thoughts and ideas. There were Nestorian Christians who believed in another world for animals where they would be free from enforced labour; there were Persian Manicheans who believed that Satan was as much Lord as the High God; there were sun-worshippers and fire-worshippers; Hindus; Buddhists and Muslims; there were ancestor-worshippers who used to fill their temples with life-size effigies of the dead and ring their bells night and day; there were Uigurs who used to drown unwanted female infants, and kill off the old people by force-feeding them over-greasy food.

Polo would have recognized only one building in Tashkurgan today. This is the fort, the Stone Tower which gives the town its name. It stands on a slight rise and is a square structure with double castellated ramparts. It is built of stone and faced with mud brick. It has an impressive gateway which overlooks a stretch of flooded pastureland. The shattered ruins of the old silk town lie beyond.

With that half-hour visit to the fort we exhausted the sightseeing possibilities of Tashkurgan. We returned to the one street and began searching in earnest for a way out of the place. At the caravanserai there was no news, at the post office no attendant and at the school there was no English-speaker. There was nothing to be done. Reconciling myself to spending the next week in Tashkurgan I dug in my rucksack for something to read. In Lahore, Mozaffir had allowed us free range in his library, but it did not contain much in the way of holiday reading. Shelves of black Penguin classics reflected his fondness for unreadable nineteenth-century philosophers: Hegel and Nietsche rubbed thick spines with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard; Freud was the only concession to the twentieth century. I longed for an Agatha Christie, but found nothing more lightweight than
The Mayor
of
Casterbridge
and
The Idiot.
Neither was at all what I wanted, but I sat down on the steps and made a start to the
Mayor.
A crowd gathered to watch, and Lou sketched them. The day passed slowly.

By evening I had sunk into a deep depression. I wandered around Tashkurgan in the gathering gloom thinking black thoughts. There are moments in all long journeys when the whole business of travelling seems utterly futile. One feels homesick, tired and above all bored. Nothing pleases. Everything palls. For me that moment came in Tashkurgan. The town was ugly and cold, the people were gawping morons and the nearest off-licence was in Kashgar. The caravanserai looked and felt like a refugee camp, which indeed was exactly what it was. I wanted to be anywhere, anywhere but not Tashkurgan. Someone suggested that I pray.

The next day I awoke to find the Pakistanis squatting in small groups around the caravanserai court, moaning and wringing their hands. A few were boiling pans of
cay
over small primus stoves. One complained of having been bitten by a rat. I lay in my sleeping bag until after noon, paralysed by despair. Lou seemed to have a higher boredom threshold than I, but to compensate for this Fate had given her a lower resistance to bacilli. That morning it
struck
her down with terrible diarrhoea. From my worm's-eye view on the floor I could see her dashing off outside every few minutes clutching her precious roll of loo paper. She would limp sadly back munching diocalm tablets. 'My bowels have died.' was her one contribution to the morning's conversation.

Then, at two o'clock, a bus drove into Tashkurgan. For a moment I thought it was an hallucination. But as it drew nearer I became sure that I was not delirious. It was a bus.
I
was certain of that. And compared to the ancient charabanc that had brought us to Tashkurgan it was a modern vehicle and fitted with such rare luxuries as windows and seats. There was only one problem. It was packed, containing perhaps sixty of the
Hajji
we had seen at the border post. They looked even iller than they had done two days previously. Their faces were grey and pallid; their eyes dim and expressionless. When the bus drew to a halt in the middle of the street, many remained rooted in their seats, too exhausted to move. Those that did make it out did so with dragging feet, muttering under their breath and glancing around them, puzzled and bewildered. I picked up my rucksack and rushed, shrieking, out of the carav
anserai
to look for Lou. The bus seemed our one chance and I was determined to leave with it, even if it meant clinging to the roof rack.

I behaved unforgivably. With the ill
Hajji
too weak to argue, I
led
Lou into an assault on the bus, out-manoeuvring the conductor who was guarding the back door. Then. like suffragettes chaining themselves to the railings of Parliament, we seized a comer of the driver's cabin, and refused to budge. As the
Hajji
began to stumble back into the bus, a murmur of protest rose to a furious crescendo. The driver and the conductor screamed 'Posh! posh!' at us: an exclamation normally reserved for intransigent cattle. We did not move. We had absolutely no right to hijack the
Hajji
in this manner, but the idea of spending another day in Tashkurgan had made us desperate. We stood our ground and set about perjuring ourselves. Lou pretended she was violently ill, then changed her mind and decided she was pregnant. She tried miming morning sickness, the later stages of pregnancy, labour, childbirth, and caesarian section.
I
performed an elaborate charade which hinged on my visa expiring unless I was able to get to Kashgar to renew it. I gave quite a passable mime show of my arrest, imprisonment, torture and eventual deportation from China. This rather impressed the
Hajji.
It certainly confused them.

Too exhausted to remove us violently, perhaps a little sympathetic towards the deranged Europeans, the driver eventually gave up screeching at us and started the engine. We had escaped.

Around us the
Hajji
began to nod off. Women in wimples slumped forward, capped heads fell to one side. One old man, returning from Mecca with two parrots, covered their wicker cage with a drape, then rested his head on top. Looking down the length of the bus from the driver's cabin all I could see was a mass of hoods, veils, headscarves and chimney-pot mufflers. Snores began to echo above the whine of the engine. Lou and I settled ourselves on our rucksacks, and discussed all the things we would do when we arrived at Kashgar, now only a seven-hour journey away.

Suddenly the bus lurched to one side. Everyone sprang back to life, and peered out of the window to see what had happened. The street in Tashkurgan had been tarmacked, and was straight and smooth. This impressive piece of engineering came to a sudden end one hundred yards outside the town. At the end of the main street, the road dissolved into a Somme of construction trenches, ditches, mud and craters. The bus, overloaded with three months' luggage for sixty people and a museum of religious souvenirs, groaned from side to side, accompanied by the screams of women and the grinding of metal. Twice the bus seemed to be on the verge of toppling over the embankment. The wheels stuck in ruts. Quarter of a mile later the road gave up completely. The bus driver stopped, got out, looked around and tried to decide where to go. He got back into the cabin, and drove slowly on. After a few minutes we came across a diversion sign. The driver steered left and we bumped off across a stubble field. At the far end we found a track and followed it into an avenue of trees. The trees had never been polled and the branches hung down, obstructing our passage. They snapped before us, twigs brushed into the bus through open windows. The engine started to make alarming crunching noises. The women wailed. One or two jumped out of the back door.

We pressed on until it became impossible to continue. A substantial pond lay across the avenue. On it a small white duck was swimming in contented circles. We were ordered out of the bus and the luggage was unstrapped from the roof. We flexed up against the rear and pushed the bus over a drainage ditch into a ripe field of barley. There, to the amazement of a party of reaping peasants, the driver swung the bus around in a full circle, and drove it down the field, cutting a long swathe through the crop. We regained the road, and there followed about ten minutes of calm during which we saw a camel caravan trotting across the plain. They were not the tobacco-coloured Arabian camels we had seen in Pakistan, but Baetrian dromedaries, with two humps and hairy thighs and ankles, not unlike preened poodles. Then the horrors continued. Halfway up a steep slope the bus paused, hung motionless, then gently slid back down the incline, gaining momentum as it went. It keeled over violently to the right.

The journey thereafter assumed an unreal nightmare quality. I can recall the slow, tedious climb into the Ata Dagh, the breakdowns, the blizzards and the terrible cold. I remember the horrible judderings, and the speed of the bus slowly sinking
until we began to crawl along at walking pace. I remember the engine noise which seemed to increase in volume the slower we went. I remember the symphony of creaks and groans and clangs rising to its climax, and the bus drawing to a halt on a high Turkestan plateau. A series of repairs kept us going until, sometime after midnight, we drew into a freezing castellated caravanserai. There we bedded down on the floor in one big dormitory. The next morning, to Louisa's horror, we were given soup to drink with great lumps of greasy yellow yak fat floating in it.