In Xanadu (48 page)

The Nestorian priests are ignorant and debauched ... they say their prayers and have their sacred books in Syrian, a language that they do not understand. They are userers, drunkards and some live with the Tartars and have like them several wives. The bishop rarely visits their country, perhaps only once in fifty years. At that time all the male children are ordained priests, even those that are still in the cradle. Then they marry, which is completely contrary to all the teachings of the Fathers, and they are bigamists because after the death of their first wife they take a second. They are also all simoniacs, not administering any sacrament without pay....

Particularly horrifying was the service Rubruk saw performed in front of the wife of the Great Khan:

On the octave of Epiphany, all the Nestorian priests assembled in their chapel before dawn, sung matins solemnly, donned their vestments and prepared the censer and incense. And as they were waiting in the church, the first wife, called Cotota Caten, entered the chapel with several ladies and her oldest son Baltu, followed by several of his brothers. They prostrated themselves, touching the ground with their foreheads. . , .

Then the priests brought us mead to drink, made of rice and of red wine, like the wine of La Rochelle. The Queen, taking a full cup, knelt and asked for our blessing, and all the priests sang in a loud voice while she emptied her cup. When she drank once more, we had to sing, for it was our turn. Everyone was a little drunk; meat of a sheep was brought, which was quickly devoured; after that fish.
...
So the day passed until evening. Then the Queen, tottering with drunkenness, mounted her chariot in the midst of the singing and howling of the priests, and went her way. . ..

After the thirteenth century, not perhaps surprisingly, Nestorianism went into decline. By the end of the nineteenth century it was thought to have died out in the Far East, and only known to survive in any strength in eastern Turkey. The massacres of
1
917 put an end to that. In the Armenian Genocide, the Turks failed to distinguish between the Armenians and the Nestorians and within a few nights both peoples were massacred, often burned alive within their churches. Today, the only known survivors are those few who managed to escape through Kurdistan to Iraq. Salindi's news that there remained a few families of the sect still practising in Kashgar was thus a genuinely important discovery. Moreover, they would be fascinating to meet. One of their liturgies, the Mass of the Holy Apostles, dates from before 43
1
and is certainly the most ancient of those now in use. Isolated from the rest of Christianity since the fifth century, the Kashgar Nestorians might preserve untold numbers of ancient rites and practices. They have certainly never been studied.

Salindi promised to take me to meet the Nestorians although it was his last day in Kashgar before he returned to Urumchi. We arranged to meet at four o'clock outside the Id Gah mosque, on the day following our trip to the cinema. Tragically, at that time I was rushing Lou to the hospital and so missed the appointment. As soon as Lou was well enough for me to leave her, I went back to the mosque to search for

S
a
lindi. But he had gone, and
I
never saw him again. No other Uigur
I
talked to knew anything of the sect.
I
had missed my chance to talk to the only Nestorians I am ever likely to meet.

On Friday night there was a frost in Kashgar. Madam Curd, perhaps woken by the cold, appeared outside our door that morning at five-thirty. She screeched for half an hour before
I
rose to let her in. It seemed an appropriate moment to put a step to her visits. Using a number of props, I made it clear to Madam Curd that if she ever again disturbed us before ten o'clock she would be received, at the very least, with a bucket of extremely cold water.

Saturday saw the departure of a number of the Pak truck drivers. Winter was pulling in fast, and the Pakistanis were worried about the closing of the Karakoram passes. Even Mick was getting ready to pack up. He had spent one freezing winter alone in Kashgar and did not wish to spend another. He had received a letter from Lynn, who was in Sri Lanka. She had rented a beach hut near Colombo and Mick had decided to join her there.

We, however, had not moved. Nor did there seem any immediate prospect of our doing so. Lou was now sitting up, but was still too weak to leave her bed, and the difficulties of getting away from Kashgar down the southern Silk Road remained intractable. A visit to the bus station confirmed that it was impossible for a foreigner to buy a bus ticket to Khotan without a permit, nor was it easy to find an English-speaking Uigur to buy one for us. The bus station was in complete chaos. Some buses were leaving empty (an unheard-of event in Asia) while others were packed full and surrounded by mobs of ang
ry
fist-waving Uigurs.
I
circled among the crowds, jostled and shouted at, unable to find anyone who spoke English. Only the moneychangers showed any interest in me. They followed me around shouting 'Change moneys? Change dollar?' attempts to get them to go away only increased their enthusiasm They were soon noticed by the bus station security guards.

I and my suspicious-looking entourage were pursued around the bus station, in and out of bus queues, through ticket halls and waiting rooms until we eventually lost them in the melee outside.

My perseverance was eventually rewarded. In a dark booth behind the bus station, I found a degenerate-looking Uigur smoking a hashish pipe. He spoke enough English to understand what I wanted, and in due course stumbled off to the ticket office with a bundle of my money. To my surprise he came back again, but he had not got a ticket: the travel office, so he said, only reserved seats one day in advance. Hoping that we might be able to leave on Monday morning, I agreed to meet him at five o'clock the following day to try again. I roamed off towards Chini Bagh.

In the bazaar, fur hats and woolly jumpers were being hung out on the shop fronts, and the ironmongers were pulling stoves out from the storerooms. The air was cold, and some of the puddles on the ground were iced over. People seemed less willing to linger in the cafes. Everyone was hurrying home. I sat in a tea house, warming my fingers around a bowl of green tea, talking to an old russet-skinned Uigur. He said that snow had fallen the day before in Urumchi, and people were expecting a freeze. He then explained the chaos at the bus station: winter, he said, had officially begun that day, and the clocks had been changed that morning. One bazaar rumour had it that Peking time had gone back an hour; another had spread that Sinkiang time had gone forward: both rumours gained only partial credence. As a result Kashgar had ended up operating on four separate times, and the transport system had completely broken down. Back at Chini Bagh things were little better. The reception closed at sunset and the showers never opened. That night Louisa and I went to bed dirty.

The following morning Madam Curd knocked timidly at our door at seven-thirty (Sinkiang winter time). We did not use her bucket of water: it could have been six-thirty, seven-thirty, eight-thirty or nine-thirty as far as she was concerned, and we decided to be lenient.

Woken by Madam Curd's ministrations, I went out to buy some bread. I found the town totally transformed. Streams of villagers were pouring in from all over Kashgaria with great caravans of donkey carts piled high with hay, wood, or sacks of grain. Some held families of Uigurs eight or nine strong; others led horses, goats or bulls. Strings of camels ambled along the footpaths, wary both of the donkey carts and the tarmac. Sheep trotted past, fat tails flapping. Chickens squawked from wicker boxes, urchins tottered under outsized flat caps. We had forgotten the central event of the Kashgar week; the Kashgar Sunday Market. I ran back to the hotel and rose Louisa from her death bed. Together we hired a
tonga,
and joined the hordes as they poured in one solid stream towards the market.

Our cart jolted down the hill along winding willow avenues. As we neared the market the crowds thickened and the dust rose. We crawled along at walking pace. We smiled at a family in the next cart. Some of them smiled back. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, if in a slightly stolid, farmerly way. Then we turned a corner. In front of us was a vast field of swarming humanity cloaked in an enormous haze of risen dust.

In its details the market resembled the weekday bazaar, but the total effect was very different. It was a fair and a carnival, a masque and a festival, crowds and noise, smells a id treasures, a mirage through a dusk of dust. We wandered until our legs buckled beneath us, then we sat cross-legged in the tea tent of the silk merchants. We sipped
cay
from great porcelain bowls, and nibbled
tsepale,
a Tibetan delicacy of dough and fried yak's meat. The
tsepale
were tinct with hot spices. It was our last day in Kashgar and we were exhausted and happy.

Afterwards a shaven-headed
tonga
driver took us to the tomb of Akbar Hoja. There we lay in a garden of shrubs and trees surrounded by poplar avenues and vineyards still heavy with fruit. It was a cool, quiet, peaceful place and we stayed there all afternoon, wandering through the forest of brightly coloured pillars, looking up at the roof murals of paddle steamers and snow-capped mountains. They were a little incongruous and naive, but rather lovely.

That evening I got the tickets to Khotan. We washed our clothes, wrote a last clutch of letters, and went to bed early. We had a long journey ahead of us.

The security forces of the People's Republic work in strange ways. At six o'clock the bus station security guards hauled us off the morning bus to Khotan. They took us into their office and shouted at us. Although the lecture was in Chinese and we lost the finer points of the speech, we still got the general gist: if we made another attempt to enter a forbidden zone we would be fined and deported back to Pakistan. Then, only half an hour later, having decided to try hitching, we got our first lift from a convoy of army trucks. The last truck in the convoy, a little behind the others, drew to a halt and a khaki-clad Chinaman peered through the window. At first we thought the man was going to arrest us, but instead he smiled and opened the door to the driver's cabin. Happily unaware that he was aiding and abetting a crime he beckoned us in. He said he was going to Yecheng, halfway to Khotan. We jumped in. The convoy was waved through the police checkpoint at the edge of the town. It was thus as the guests of the People's Liberation Army that we left open Kashgaria and headed off into forbidden territory.

The road rapidly assumed the character that it was to maintain along its length. The Kashgar oasis extends well beyond the limits of the town itself, and at the end of the avenues of poplar and the whitewashed garden walls, we came to a belt of large state farms. Within half an hour the fields of maize were giving way to fields of wilting sunflowers, and these in turn gave way to scrub. We passed a PLA road team with sweat-wet backs, a last cluster of houses, a water tank, and then the white desert beyond. There were no dunes. The desert was flat, harsh and depressing. Ahead the lines of the tarmac road converged in the distance. There was not one tree, one bush, not one solitary
clump
of pampa grass to break the horizon. We had entered the Taklimakan.